It was such a pleasure being at the world première of Golden, a new play in Andrew Lee Creech’s nine-play cycle The Legacy Plays Project, which looks at the lives of black Americans throughout US history, and moves through that history to explore various issues that confront black people in a country that remains deeply racist. Thus the need for theatre that explores what for too many US white folks will be brand new territory, the ways in which the entire economy, our sadly broken political system, even our zoning laws which preserve racist lending practices, work to make black life impossible.
Creech’s play explores three generations: the elders, represented by Morris and Rheeda Golden performed wonderfully by Ty Willis and Tracy Michelle Hughes, and the younger generation, Jazmine Harris, Quikk and Earl performed by Elena Flory-Barnes, Kaughlin Carver and Arlando Smith, as well as Jazmine’s child, Zora Harris, played by the talented newcomer, high-schooler Mesgana Alemshowa, making her professional debut in Golden.
Ably directed by Tyrone Phillips, Golden shows a doubled-edged reality of this portrait of black life: the older generation, the elders, are struggling with survival, as are the younger generation. For the elders, the tension is mostly about materiality as shown by house ownership: a house Morris owns is tying him down so far that he can’t escape: it needs too many repairs. In this case, the house has a second mortgage that has been used to cover some of those deferred costs, but also to keep Morris’s laundromat alive.
What is in effect a third mortgage, some kind of loan of twenty-two thousand US dollars, has been used by Rheeda to finance her education as a nurse. These actions by the Goldens are not only affecting their finances, they’re tearing apart their marriage. The real issue, to use language from David Brooks’s The Second Mountain, is that Morris is climbing the first mountain, that is, career, living situation, romantic partnership and the other tasks that define adults in the first half of their lives.
Meanwhile, Rheeda is facing her inability to find a job as a nurse after completing her education and entering a new phase: that lack of a job triggers, for her, a crisis in which she has to confront that she wants to serve a greater cause, here the earthquake in Haiti, what Brooks calls the second mountain. (The younger generation are all busy finding ways to survive, just to keep body and soul together.)
The world the six characters live in is entirely a black world. Unlike, say, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, there are no white folks anywhere, who hold visible power to keep black people back; instead, Morris takes then President Obama to task for getting nothing done, even though he is the first black president. Any evil found in Creech’s construction is from black people towards black people. The play takes place Prince George’s County, Maryland, where black business ownership is remarkably high, as in the case of Golden’s laundromat, but that's not enough.
The set and lighting by Parmida Ziaei and Robert J Aguilar are set in tension to one another: Ziaei’s set is divided between realism on the one hand, near the stage floor, and open skies with a huge telephone or electric mast and wires that overshadow the bottom half of the stage picture. Like Jo Mielziner’s original set design for Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, the action takes place in an area overwhelmed by what is around the place people live or work. In Ziaei’s design as lit by Aguilar, the sky and the mast together shows the passage of time (the laundromat clock does not) but also gives a huge sense of freedom and opportunity, as Jazmine explores her options as a real estate project manager and Quikk is busy trying his best to fit into the American Dream that has so far excluded him. (It’s Earl who describes himself as a tenant in his own country, but that could describe the whole cast.)
A lovely next step for Creech, I look forward to other productions of the rest of the Legacy Plays Project, and congratulations also to ACT Contemporary Theatre as it moves forward with its joint season with partner Seattle Shakespeare Company.