Lead performances are powerhouse and production design one of the year’s most electrifying, but Richard Wright’s 20th-century classic Native Son is ill-served at Antaeus Theatre Company by Nambi E. Kelley’s 21st-century stage adaptation’s temporal zigzags, sledgehammer approach to issues of race, and the addition of a “character” not found in the original novel.

 Kelley’s 2014 play is not the first time Wright’s 1940 book has been adapted for the stage. The novelist himself collaborated with Pulitzer Prize-winner Paul Green the year after Native Son’s publication, and both Wright’s novel and his and Green’s 1941 Broadway play take a chronological approach to African-American protagonist Bigger Thomas’s tragic downfall, introducing us first to the 20-year-old’s home life in the Chicago slums circa 1939 (he kills a rat that’s been sharing Bigger’s family’s cramped apartment), then to his best friend Buddy and their plan to rob a local white business, and finally to the job Bigger gets offered as chauffeur to wealthy slum landlord Henry Dalton, his blind wife, and (most significantly) to his frisky young daughter Mary, whose drunken seduction attempts prove life-destroying.

Playwright Kelley telegraphs events by starting right off with Mary’s unintentional murder (Bigger accidentally suffocates her with a pillow when trying to prevent her mother from hearing her daughter and the just-hired chauffeur in a compromising position) before flashing back and forward in time at machine-gun speed through events Wright takes deliberate time to describe.

Not only does this approach prove confusing, it eliminates any element of surprise or suspense, the play’s prologue already having suggested that Bigger will not come to any sort of good end.

 Kelley’s heavy-handed treatment of racism not only erases any traces of subtlety as Bigger hurtles downward, it proves counterproductive to creating sympathy for a protagonist whose actions (rape and a deliberate second killing among them) are hard to stomach.

 Also problematic is Kelley’s decision to transform the rodent that Bigger kills into his alter ego, a character Kelley calls “The Black Rat” and describes in her script as “the physical manifestation of Bigger’s double consciousness, or how Bigger sees himself through the eyes of others,” a concept that may work on paper but for this reviewer at least, instead adds to the confusion inherent in the playwright’s helter-skelter approach and a further hammering in of points already made clear by Bigger’s actions and the reactions of those around him.

What does work quite stunningly is one of the most extraordinary production design collaborations I’ve seen in a good long while, Adam R. Macia’s animated black-and-white videos projected on scenic designer Edward E. Haynes, Jr.’s striking, multi-level, multi-purpose urban set, lit to electrifying effect by Andrew Schmedake and underscored throughout by Jeff Gardner’s most masterful sound design to date. (It’s no wonder tech took a full five days.)

It’s perhaps for practical reasons alone that Native Son is Antaeus’s first non-partner-cast production, one headed by a breathtaking Jon Chaffin as Bigger in what must surely be the most physically and emotionally draining role in his career, albeit one that might be better served by an actor closer to the character’s still vulnerable, still maturing twenty years of age.

Under Andi Chapman’s breakneck-paced direction, Noel Arthur’s The Black Rat, Brandon Rachal’s Buddy, and Mildred Marie Langford’s Bessie and Vera provide powerful support as does Victoria Platt’s Hannah in a smaller role.

 Actors playing white characters (Ellis Greer as Mary, Matthew Grondin as Jan, Gigi Bermingham as Mrs. Dalton, and Ned Mochel as Britten) do what they can with parts written as either overtly racist, well-meaning-but-racist, or think-he’s-not-racist-but-he-is cliches.

Bo Foxworth’s intense fight choreography, Jacquelyn Gutierrez’s props, and Orlando de la Paz’s scenic artistry complete Native Son’s astonishing production design.

Jessica Williams is assistant director. Taylor Anne Cullen is production stage manager and Jessica Osorio is assistant stage manager. Dylan Southard is dramaturg. Donathan Walters understudies Bigger and The Black Rat.

Additional program credits are shared by Adam Meyer (production manager and technical director), Cuyler Perry (assistant technical director), Joi Carr and Addison Doby (music arrangers), and Indira Tyler (featured movement consultant).

The almost unanimous raves showered on Native Son’s 2014 Chicago World Premiere had me expecting yet another Antaeus Theatre Company triumph. Though design and the majority of performances merit cheers, the production as a whole does not.

Kiki & David Gindler Performing Arts Center, 110 East Broadway, Glendale.
www.Antaeus.org

–Steven Stanley
April 19, 2018
Photos: Geoffrey Wade Photography

Tags: Los Angeles Theater Review, Nambi E. Kelley, Richard Wright, The Antaeus Company