This past Sunday I saw Donja R. Love’s play produced at the Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia (SPOILER ALERT: If you do not want to know the plot and the resolution of this theatrical work, please do not continue reading.) This play was worth the wait. Whereas I am ready to call this work a “play” because it is rehearsed, performed, and staged by a cast and crew and its elements, Donja made clear to me that he wants his work to be considered an “offering” rather than a play.
This “offering” should be produced, supported and seen for two main reasons. One, it unites the sacred and the secular of the Black radical tradition and restores the role of the Black church as the vanguard for social change. Two, it demonstrates better than any other play in the twenty first century the value of the masculine-feminine dynamic in overcoming ANY obstacle to pass moral values to the younger generation.
This play is an obvious response to Jasper Wiliams’s troublesome eulogy of Aretha Franklin that pathologized the Black family since the civil rights movement. In this eulogy the moral ills of our LGBTQ or SGL (Same Gender Loving) members were blamed for the downfall of the Black family, instead of the rampant deindustrialization and mass incarceration that came to define the end of the twentieth century. Donja’s offering shows us that the LGBTQ or the SGL members are the vanguard or the future of the Black family.
The play begins and ends with a sermon in a pulpit. It begins with Reverend Bridges asking his congregation where the beauty is, in the midst of our daily difficulties. The play ends with Reverend Bridges’ grandson answering his grandfather’s question and telling his younger congregation thirty years later, that the answer to his grandfather’s question of where to find the beauty in life is, in himself. Despite the social conditions that try to deny Black life beauty, from the AIDS epidemic to deindustrialization, to a church culture that is handicapped by homophobia, Manny at the end of this play shows that in his life is beauty. The first act is set in 1986 Brooklyn, New York and the second act is set in 2016 Jackson, Mississippi.
Donja’s offering does a remarkable job of showing the beauty of Manny’s life, first in the life of his father J.R. who dies by the end of the first act, to the life of his son who demonstrates what it looks like to hold on to beauty.
In the first act, we are introduced to the “beauty” of J.R. Not only is he physically attractive with a powerful machismo performed unforgettably by Jude Tibeau, he also enjoys a healthy sex life.
(a photo of me and Jude Tibeau who performed J.R. & Manny)
J.R. asks his pregnant wife Max if they can have sex, and she politely declines and encourages him to get tested at the doctor’s office. When J.R. gets tested, his Doctor “Steinberg” tells him he has AIDS. Before he leaves the doctor’s office, he is approached by a caring advocate in Abdul who invites him to a group therapy session for HIV positive men.
At this session, we meet an HIV positive corporate scion in Troy, a transwoman named Grace, and a young man “with lesions on his face” named Eric. J.R. is encouraged to tell Max that he is HIV positive. When he tells her, she discloses that since their conception, she got tested and that she and her child is HIV negative. She meets Abdul and, as J.R. told his group, his wife Max and him have “an understanding” about him sleeping with men and women.
This is the part of the play where the audience feels the “beauty” of sexual freedom for J.R. Max notices the nonverbal chemistry between J.R. and Abdul and invites Abdul to spend the night with J.R. while she visits her friend Vernetta, suggesting the whole time her own intimate relationship with Vernetta.
Love’s offering shows us that an AIDS diagnosis does not have to be a death sentence that requires a suppression of one’s sexuality. Max cherishes her husband’s relationship with his lover Abdul. She does not use his disclosure of his status as a ball and chain to police his sexuality or stifle his beauty. In the relationship of Max and J.R., we see unapologetic beauty. We see the beautiful affection between J.R. and Abdul, we J.R. living his full life.
Abdul introduces a camcorder to the group and brings a camcorder to Max. Max encourages J.R. to record a video for their soon-to-be born child. J.R. obliges and sings to the recording device. He sings with a passion and an awareness and reflects the beauty that Max and Abdul have showed him. This beauty is plucked at when the supply of health insurance medications that J.R. is using on Max’s employment is threatened when her co-workers start ostracizing her because of the rumor about J.R. having HIV. When Max chooses to inform J.R.’s parents about their situation, Max and J.R. argue. We as the audience feel the social pressures that J.R. endures for choosing to hold on to the beauty in his life. Abdul passes from AIDS, then J.R. We see the social pressures on Max. She loses her husband, her lover, and her child’s father. In one scene, these pressures trigger an emotional outburst in her. Toni L. Martin’s talent shines in this scene and culminates in her taking out J.R.’s robe and wearing it.
(A photo of me and Toni L. Martin who performed Max)
The first act ends with a visit to Max by J.R.’s father, the Reverend Bridges who is clearly paralyzed by the stigma of AIDS. Max declines his offer but with the social pressures of the care of a newborn, an increasingly comfortable alcoholism, she eventually takes the Reverend up on his offer to allow him and his wife to raise her son.
In the second act we are introduced to a group home for SGL queer youth, led by Reggie. We are fast forwarded thirty years to see J.R.’s son Manny now, thirty years old, in a relationship with Elijah who both live in a dilapidating shack in Jackson, Mississippi, that also is home to Terrell, a “flamboyant teenager” and Eve “a transwoman in her early twenties.”
This act we see the son of J.R. who is Manny hold on to the “beauty” that a repressive society taught him to deny. Manny’s ambition in this act is to get meds for his HIV positive lover Elijah, and he endures several obstacles in the twenty first century to do so. He holds on to the beauty and the audience sees the sacrifices he makes to hold on to it.
Manny does not realize that the nurse that Reggie has hired part-time to take care of Elijah is none other than Max, his biological mother. She surprises Manny when she notices him drink his stash of booze hidden on the front porch, recalling the social pressures she succumbed to decades before.
The sympathy for Manny rises as he talks with his father Reverend Bridges who keeps a veil over Manny’s head about the true identity of his biological mother and father. The fact that Reverend Bridges is completely unable throughout the entire play to tell Manny about his father J.R. and the beauty in his life is a sincere tragedy, and it shows how SERIOUS the stigma of HIV and AIDS was for people of Bridges’s generation.
Part of Manny’s beauty is his patience with Elijah, his belief in modern medicine, and his belief that this medicine will keep Elijah alive and maintain part of his beauty which is affection with Elijah, and his loving relationship with Elijah. We see how Manny will do anything for Elijah. To keep his beauty, Manny sells sex to a wealthy patron in Adam despite the havoc this creates in his relationship with Elijah. The stage directions tells us that the sex Adam pays for from Manny is “quick as can be, but for Adam, it’s everything he needs it to be.”
When he returns to the group house, Eve is the one who tells Manny “I saw you get out that car.” Eve asks Manny to be careful. Elijah interrogates Manny who replies that “I told him I upped my prices. And it worked. Now I got money to go towards all the repairs the house needs and to help pay for Ms. Max.” However Elijah tells Manny that he is giving up on him. Manny is no longer sleeping in their bed: he now sleeps in the attic. Terrell tells Manny that his lover’s mother kicked him out of his house and Terrell asks Manny if his lover can stay in the group home. Manny says “of course.”
Amid the social pressures that Max faces, Manny goes out on the porch for his secret stash of booze, where Max reveals to Manny that she is his biological mother. Manny is furious and orders Max to leave. Before she leaves, she hands Manny a VHS cassette that Manny reluctantly but eventually seeks to watch. When Manny confronts Reverend Bridges about his true maternity and paternity, he offers a hush money check of one thousand dollars to Manny. Manny says to make it twenty five hundred. The Reverend obliges, but only if Manny agrees to become the new Reverend of his church. Reverend Bridges shows himself here as a passive figure. He does not “go forward” to make new disciples as Jesus did. Instead he waits until he is acrimoniously confronted to educate the younger generation about the truth of where they came from.
When Manny returns to the attic, Reggie notices him looking for the VHS tape cassette player and locates it for Manny. Manny watches his father J.R. and evidently musters the strength he needs to tell his congregation how one can in fact live with the God given beauty one is allowed. Manny and Max reconcile.
This offering destroys the myth that the Black family is dead.
This offering destroys the myth of the “no-good” Black man who wants no relationship with his children.
This offering destroys the myth of the Black woman as a hopeless nag.
This offering destroys the myth that Black women hate Bisexual or gay men.
This offering must be seen, produced, reviewed and studied. -RF.
Thank you to Donja R. Love, Theresa Davis, Brandon Nick, Jennifer Fritz, Larry Felzer, and my grandmother Maudlin Young who each made my review possible. -RF.