At the beginning of Kimber Lee’s Brownsville Song: B-Side for Tray, the character Lena (Eileen B. Lymus Sanders) tearfully and angrily tells us that the murder of her grandson Tray is not to be relegated to the world of statistics, to “the same old thing.” There was nothing typical about Tray: he wasn’t in a gang, he was planning to go to college, he was a Golden Gloves champion and “he was mine” — too real, too beloved to be filed away as just another victim of the ghetto. Lena even demands that the play start with someone else because “I’m not the beginning; I’m the end.” If we in the audience are to understand anything at all, we must see Tray alive.
And so we do. Moving back and forth in time, playwright Lee proceeds to show us the young Tray Franklin (Tony J. Collins) with his little sister Devine (Kaylee Tupper Miller), his stepmother Merrell (Caitlin Greene) and his grandmother Lena. And thanks to the fine acting of a top-notch Stageworks cast, we soon come to see that Tray (based on a real person) is a complex young man who has navigated much adversity — the shooting death of his father, the alcoholism and drug addiction of his stepmother — and is, before his murder, on the verge of a college scholarship and a bright career as an educator. Collins’ Tray is no angelic stereotype, though: He’s an impatient, sometimes stubborn late-adolescent who cares more for his boxing than for writing his scholarship essay, who clearly finds his grandmother overbearing at times, and whose friendship with the less savory Junior (DuJuan Cole) finally lands him in the wrong place at the wrong time. Collins is at his best when recovering-addict Merrell applies for a job at the Starbucks where Tray works (she wasn’t aware he was employed there). Tray, who has every reason to be incensed at his absentee stepmother, conducts the job interview with a stunning mixture of grace and resentment such that we can’t clearly tell whether he’ll support or quash her ambitions. Collins may appear too old to be Tray, but aside from this, his performance is impeccable: We leave the theater feeling we know the character in full.
The same is true of the other performers: As directed by Ron Bobb-Semple, they present us with an entirely convincing, variegated world in which the human drive for happiness is almost strong enough to overcome the depredations of social history. Most prominent is Sanders as Lena, a powerful, deeply feeling force of nature strong enough to wreck the whole stage but also painfully conscious that to do so won’t bring Tray back. In the scenes preceding Tray’s murder, Sanders is every adolescent’s nemesis, a demanding parental figure watching every move and refusing to back down on her call to perfection.
Greene’s Merrell is just the opposite: more passive than active, possessed of an innocence that makes her abandonment of Devine — her biological daughter — all the more poignant, she’s full of good intentions which she may not have the staying power to realize. Greene’s Merrill fumbles through her encounters with Tray and Lena, and when she says that she doesn’t know if she can stay sober, we find the proof in the actor’s careful demonstration of weakness and confusion. As her little daughter, Miller is joyfully adorable, winning our hearts in her first scenes — she’s especially sweet portraying a tree in a school dance event — and making it easy to believe her love for Tray and his for her. Cole has very few moments onstage, but his Junior is a credible ambassador from the dangerous streets, where Tray was killed for no reason at all.
Amanda Bearss’ set isn’t very interesting. It gives us several areas at one time, including a bedroom, a kitchen, a dining room and an outdoor bench, but this could just as well be a middle-class environment as not, and the confusion isn’t productive. Far better are Saidah Ben Judah’s costumes — I especially enjoyed the expressive tee-shirts — and John Burchett’s lighting is generally excellent except for one too-abrupt shift to signal a flashback. Brownsville Song is about 90 minutes long, presented without intermission, and it moves swiftly from scene to scene and from present to past and back again. The play’s ending is perhaps too upbeat, but author Lee presents us with so much stark realism most of the time, we can easily forgive her her formulaic finale. The fact is, this is a sad song and Lee generally looks its sadness straight on. The result is a work of art that’s moving — and at times, illuminating.
Mark E. Leib's theater criticism for CL has won seven awards for excellence from the Society for Professional Journalists. His own plays have been produced Off-Broadway and in Chicago, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and the Tampa Bay Area. He is a Continuing Instructor at USF, and has an MFA in Playwriting from the Yale School of Drama, where he won the CBS Foundation Prize in Playwriting. Contact him here.
This article appears in Feb 8-15, 2018.
