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Our Lady needs a prayer or two
BY STEVE VINEBERG
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Our Lady of 121st Street
By Stephen Adly Guirgis. Directed by Paul Melone. Set and lighting designed by Eric Levenson. Costumes by Jenna Rossi-Camus. With Vincent E. Siders, Jacqui Parker, Ricardo Engermann, Jim Spencer, Luis Negrón, Jennifer Young, and Ray McDavitt. Presented by SpeakEasy Stage Company at the Boston Center for the Arts through March 27.
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Our Lady of 121st Street, the first work by the hot young playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis (Jesus Hopped the "A" Train) to reach Boston audiences, is a mess, but there’s a lot of talent in it. The first act is a collection of two- and three-character scenes gathered around the wake of a nun, Sister Rose, whose tough-tender treatment of the kids at the Harlem Catholic school where she taught endeared her to them. Several have returned to their old neighborhood to pay their respects. But the proceedings are halted while the police search for her body, which has disappeared from its casket along with her photo. This cockeyed set-up gives the play a daffy, absurdist tilt, though as the act unfolds you can’t imagine how Guirgis will resolve it dramatically or how the glimpses of the lives of the former schoolmates, now in their 30s, are going to come together. These include Balthazar (Ricardo Engermann), now a cop; Rooftop (Vincent E. Siders), an LA disc jockey terrified of running into his ex-wife, Inez (Jacqui Parker); and Norca (Elaine Theodore), whose affair with Rooftop helped break up his marriage and who hasn’t been able to slide out from her dependence on various substances. Then there’s Flip (Jim Spencer), who moved to Wisconsin to practice law and come out — and who has no intention of revealing his sexuality to his childhood buddies. Edwin (Luis Negrón) stayed in the neighborhood to take care of his brother Pinky (Paulo Branco), who was brain-damaged when they were kids, as a result of Edwin’s stupidity or anger or both. The first act introduces their various situations, in raucous, freely imagined language. The best encounters are the ones between Balthazar and the foul-mouthed, mean-spirited Norca at the precinct, Norca and Inez in a diner (a scene that expands to include a young white woman from Connecticut played by Stacy Fischer), and Rooftop and the paraplegic priest (Ray McDavitt) who hears his highly unorthodox confession. Also worth recalling is the opening dialogue between Balthazar and a mourner (Robert D. Murphy) who somehow lost his trousers during the removal of Sister Rose’s body (he was asleep). In these funny, eruptive encounters, the actors revel in Guirgis’s language and in his quick-sketch portraits. The play falls apart in the second act, when the tone shifts uncomfortably to dead serious and we’re made to pay for the good time we had in act one. Here’s where we find out all the things we didn’t want to know about the characters, who play out their bitterness, guilt, and remorse in moldy retreads of the kind of scenes you can see on network TV just about any night of the week. Guirgis writes one major emotional revelation scene after another in what feels like a desperate attempt to glue the disparate strands of his play together, but they won’t stick. He particularly miscalculates with Balthazar by waiting until the last scene to expose a secret in the cop’s past that no one in the audience can have failed to figure out an hour earlier. The best performances in the Paul Melone–directed SpeakEasy Stage production are given by the actors whose physical choices for their characters complement their skill with the language — Vincent E. Siders, Jacqui Parker, Elaine Theodore, Ricardo Engermann, and Stacy Fischer (though her character’s presence is never explained adequately). Theodore is so utterly believable as Norca, whose outbursts come from some curdled place inside her, that I wished there were more of her; the scene she shares with Parker and Fischer is, in performance terms, the highlight. The production is weakest in the exchanges between the two brothers, between Flip and his lover (Rodney Raftery), and between Edwin and Sister Rose’s neurotic niece Marcia (Jennifer Young) — though I wouldn’t say that’s entirely the fault of the hard-working actors, since the writing here is obvious, pushed. The brothers’ scenes are sentimental, and the near-connection between Edwin and Marcia has the overheated quality you find in works by John Patrick Shanley and other playwrights who specialize in stylized New York milieux. And the exchanges between the gay men simply aren’t plausible: I never bought that they were partners, or that Flip invited his boyfriend to Harlem for emotional support and then pretended they weren’t involved. Guirgis has a gift, but clumsy dramaturgy and an over-reliance on melodrama short-circuit it.
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