UNARMED BLACK TEEN SHOT, KILLED BY POLICE The headline happens to come from the June 20, 2018 issue of USA Today, but it could just as well describe the shooting experienced first-hand by Cleveland police officers Ryan and Amina in Kevin Artigue’s conversation-provoking Sheepdog, a gut-punching South Coast Repertory World Premiere.

Interracial cop couple Ryan (Lea Coco) and Amina (Erika LaVonn) would seem to embody the post-racist America we may have thought we heading towards when they met and fell in love during the Obama years.

She: A black East Side Cleveland native with a love of James Baldwin (whom she promises to someday actually read, which is at least better than Ryan, who’s never even heard of the guy).

He: A white, small-town Ohioan with a deceased racist dad, who’s brought his love of Pearl Jam (a grunge group Amina knows no better than Ryan does Baldwin) to the big city with him.

Not only do the couple have a meet cute to do any Hollywood romcom proud, they serve and protect with pride, and as Ryan motivates Amina throughout her recovery from a potentially crippling on-the-job injury, they fall irresistibly in love.

Then comes the afternoon Ryan pulls over 17-year-old Brandon Mayfield for a missing front license plate and the next thing you know, the police officer is calling Amina to inform her through gasps, “I shot someone. I think they’re dead.”

The events that ensue are both specific to this particular shooting and emblematic of what takes place far too often in USA Today.

Initially at least, Ryan’s actions seem dictated by prescribed police protocol (a split-second decision to fire his gun that went horribly, fatally wrong) … and then they’re not.

Some evidence is buried, other evidence is tampered with, and throughout it all, Ryan’s narrative keeps changing in subtle and not so subtle ways.

What is truth? What is fabrication? And perhaps more importantly, for Ryan and Amina at least, were the former’s actions prompted by lingering traces of a father’s racism he thought he’d long gotten over? (He had, after all, fallen in love with a black woman, not because of or in spite of her color, but simply because.)

So artfully is Sheepdog written that I defy anyone in the audience to guess with certainty whether Artigue is black or white, and so powerfully is it performed under Leah C. Gardiner’s compelling direction that you can expect to be glued to your seat from start to finish.

LaVonn does stunning double duty, both as narrator and participant, and if the second-person “you” Amina employs in talking to the audience can be off-putting, it does achieve the desired effect of getting us to imagine ourselves in her shoes.

With his action-hero cops looks and stature (and acting chops to match), Coco proves a perfect choice for Ryan, a role he not only invests with depth and heart, he and the equally riveting LaVonn display palpable romantic chemistry along the way.

Scenic designer Myung Hee Cho’s striking abstract set is absolutely right for Sheepdog’s memory-play format, Leah Piehl gives Ryan and Amina just-right costumes to wear, Cameron Jaye Mock lights it all with drama-enhancing flair, and Vincent Olivieri and Martín Carillo’s sound design crackles and pops to electrifying effect enhanced by Carillo’s original music and Melody Butiu’s and Ricardo Salinas’s neatly delineated prerecorded voices.

April Sigman-Marks is assistant director. Jerry Patch is dramaturg. Holly Ahlborn is production manager and Darlene Miyakawa is stage manager. Casting is by Joanne DeNaut, CSA.

Sheepdog asks many questions, then asks us to come up with the answers, or at least try our best to. Sunday’s Easter-evening audience was entirely white. Here’s hoping future performances will bring in significant numbers of people of color, for this is a play to be shared and discussed among all of us who must work together to ensure that the events it describes stop being the stuff of daily headlines.

South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa.
www.scr.org

–Steven Stanley
April 21, 2019
Photos: Jordan Kubat/SCR

Tags: Kevin Artigue, Orange County Theater Review, South Coast Repertory