Dael Orlandersmith's Yellowman is a powerful, shocking, and finally poignant play about light-skinned and dark-skinned African Americans in South Carolina in the late 20th century. Following two in particular — dark-skinned Alma, played brilliantly by Fanni Green, and "high yella" Eugene, portrayed sensitively by the impressive Jim Wicker (who is himself white) — Orlandersmith shows us how prejudice within a small community can shatter lives, wreck futures, split families and define the whole world. Green and Wicker also play Alma and Eugene's parents and schoolmates, and they're so successful at doing so, you'll walk out of the theater thinking you just saw not two but a dozen actors, each wonderfully talented and crushingly authentic.
Yellowman was a Pulitzer Prize finalist nine years ago, and, in my estimation, it might easily have won. This is theater so honest it hurts – and if you've ever been the target of someone's bigotry, or of your own self-doubt and loathing, it will speak to you eloquently. For reasons I can't fathom, there were lots of empty seats on opening night at the Straz Center, so maybe I need to spread the word: this Jobsite Theater production is fascinating theater whatever your color, and so wrenching it's cathartic. Catch it if you can.
The play starts when Eugene and Alma are schoolchildren who happen to become playmates — and already skin color impacts their world. Eugene's mother is light-skinned like him, but his father Robert is dark-skinned and angry at the son he can't identify with. Eugene himself is without prejudice: he befriends Alma because she's fun to play with, and hangs out with a darker-skinned boy named Alton because they share a love of comic books. But the first time Eugene goes to Alton's house, the boy's mother sends him away after accusing him of wanting to mock her son. And when Alma's father John pays a rare visit to his family, he rejects Alma as being too dark-skinned to deserve his love. Like children everywhere who are witnesses to bigotry, Eugene and Alma at first see these developments as inexplicable. But they can't be ignored; and already at a young age, Alma is coming to despise herself.
Years pass, and Eugene is an adolescent with a burning desire for sex — preferably with Alma. His friend Wyce tries to teach him to want light-skinned girls only, and delights in telling how he scared Alton off by slitting the throat of one of the boy's puppies. But it's Alma that Eugene wants, and when he finally kisses her, he feels that he's "home." During a visit with his deeply prejudiced grandfather, Eugene is encouraged to share the older man's bigotry, but holds out for a more egalitarian attitude. Then Alma gets a scholarship to New York's Hunter College, and Eugene, deeply in love, takes to visiting her regularly. It would seem that these two will be able to transcend the deep divisions they've been taught to acknowledge all their lives. But the forces of hate are terribly strong. Even after Alma and Eugene become engaged, they're not safe from a bitterly stratified world.
If Orlandersmith's script is superb, so too is the acting in this Jobsite production. Why bother to travel to New York for top-rate performing when the luminous Fanni Green is onstage in Tampa, playing Alma? Green shows us everything in her performance: how a girl becomes a woman, how a country mouse becomes a city mouse, how a self-hating Southerner turns into a self-confident Northerner. It was only last week that I was hurrying readers to see Dahlia Legault in Disco Pigs; now I have to borrow their indulgence and send the same readers to the Straz Center to see Green's spectacular work in Yellowman. As for Jim Wicker's impersonation of Eugene, well, I've been reviewing this actor for over a decade and I've never seen him more raw or more honest than he is in this scorcher. Director Karla Hartley once again shows her genius for placing actors squarely in what Yeats called "the foul rag and bone shop of the heart," and set designer Scott Cooper, offering a minimalist environment of a raised wooden platform and some chairs, gives us no less than we need for a full, imaginative experience.
If there's one group in particular that really must see this play, it's artists, whether literary, visual or performing. Think of it as a clinic in aesthetic truthfulness. And then go back to your own canvas and aim for the same heights. Sometimes I worry about the state of American theater. But if Yellowman is possible, we're much better off than I feared. The subject may be uncomfortable; but the treatment is sublime.
This article appears in Mar 17-23, 2011.
