I often come off like a chihuahua on sugar pills when reviewing plays for this magazine. I am excitable, yes, but never in the service of idle flattery. I also take no joy in being critical of people’s hard work. I’ve said this whole thing before several times, but I feel compelled to do so whenever I have mixed news to give.
The news is mixed, my friends. The news is mixed.
Let’s start with the factual, go to the good, and hopefully bury the bad at the bottom of this article.
Aziza Barnes’ BLKS debuted at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago in 2017. She’s an alum of NYU and Ole Miss by way of Los Angeles and seems to intimately know the lives of the chronically challenged female in Bushwick, circa 2015.
The play is set exactly at 850 Broadway, on the border of Bushwick and Bed-Stuy, right off the Kosciuszko J train. I lived a ten-minute walk from the exact spot this is supposed to take place in during the time it was set. I know this stop like I know the four-dimensional characters she’s conjured for this work.
They ring clarion true.
The women represented in BLKS are templates for the strivers in the borough: one on the Wall Street track, one with dreams of the cinema, and another with stand-up comedy in her blood. This is as likely a grouping of roommates in Bushwick as you can imagine, as unlikely as it may seem for nearly anywhere else. My first impression is the very natural way the group interacts with each other, how their “girl code” works, and the fluidity in facing curveballs a knot of smart women can manage. This is prosaic on its face, but to make this dynamic feel real to someone who’s seen it up close for half their life is a task.
BLKS is well-written and paced, combining straight-up comedy with disarming realities of being Black, queer, and female in the city. It snaps you out of a comfort zone at a moment’s notice. Even in the most progressive of towns, with the most understanding flatmates, controversy finds a way to the door. Barnes crafts situations and rapport that have to come from lived experience, as they are all too familiar.
I brought my best friend with me, feminist author and institution at BUST magazine, Callie Watts. For all I think I know, I’m just as aware of knowing what I don’t. I wanted to poke her brain for things my male goggles might have gotten blurry. She lived a few blocks away from this setting in 2015 as well. Literally off the next stop on the J. The lifestyles depicted in this play mirror her and her flatmates’ experiences in hilarious ways. We reminisced on that and talked about the show in depth over a nightcap. I’d say we’re pretty lockstep on the rest of this article.
Zakiyyah Jackson plays Imani, the comedian of the three. She is resplendent in this role. There’s an aspect of sinking into a character that goes far beyond knowing the lines, shaping your face and body into the right emotive poses, and hitting your marks. Zakiyyah remembered to do all of that, but also made the character entertaining and attractive. She made Imani someone you want to know. She dominates every scene she is in, and her absence is felt when she is not on stage.
The artifice of theatre is in the execution of the script. The art is in making it compelling. This also sounds obvious, but the details of a great performance require decisions on the actors’ part that cannot be written or directed. I’m giving her props for all the little decisions she made to take a well-written role and transform it into a breathing being. The whole thing is a pretty equally balanced ensemble piece, but it would have been critically diminished without her dedication to making Imani real.
This is where it gets dicey. Let me take the big picture first before I get into the pixels. There seems to have been a wild disparity in preparedness for each scene. Not necessarily for each actor, as I’ll get into in a second, but for scenes. I’m not sure if this is a rehearsal issue or not, but it was hard to miss. One actor will shine in one beat and be completely off in the next. It’s confusing as an audience member to watch a solid parlay of banter descend into a clumsy fumbling of intention, only to be redeemed minutes later.
It was like watching someone nod off behind the wheel on a busy highway. I kept wanting to reach out and help, grab the wheel or something, only to have to snatch back my hand when they found their lane again. When it is good, it is great. When it isn’t, it just makes me sad. Because I know this group has the chops.
I give Zakiyyah a pass here because, like I said earlier, she arrived with her homework complete. I’ll carve out a space here for Terra Comer as well, who gives her character Ry ample complexity and truth, consistently.
Journey Entzminger and Sydnee Graves form the other two vertices on this friend triangle but seem to glitch to an echelon of capability below their talent at the most unexpected times. I loved Sydnee in VA Rep’s The Complete Works of William Shakespeare last year and was really stoked to see her again. She comes in guns blazing and deadshots her opening scene/monologue. From here on out, I either got that same brilliance or someone who seemed detached from the material.
Same thing for Journey. I was so confused. One minute, she’s got me rolling in my seat, and the next I have to wonder where that character went. There is a thing that happens when an actor feels a kinship to a scene or monologue and leans heavy on it. The idea that delivering whatever the “Alas, poor Yorick” high note to perfection is tantamount to a fully realized performance is just wrong.
Fatigue is a real thing, and my seeing this play well into its run is taken into consideration. Theatre is a marathon, not a sprint. The more I think about it, that’s what I think I saw here. Usain Bolts running the Tour de France. Yes, I know that’s a bike race, but you get it. It’s long.
Emma Rossettini is perfectly on beat as the white girl with questions. No notes. Keep doing that. I felt for her character as much as I wanted to roll my eyes at her. And that, my friends, is how you play an audience. We are the fiddle, and we deserve to be played well.
Demond Middleton, while giving a flawless depiction of a street pest, fades in and out of focus as a “nice” guy the ladies meet at a club. There are moments that convinced me of his talent, and then there are moments when I had to question what this person was doing on this stage. I hate to say that. I really do. But the swings in quality were jarring. I wanted so badly to enjoy this without hesitation, but I felt like we were racing a Formula One car with the parking brake on.
As I always do, I want to shout out the technical crew that built a great and versatile set. The screens doing double duty as projection surfaces and diaphanous windows into intimate spaces were inspired. Lighting in those spaces might need a tweak, though, unless having the cast in semi-silhouette was on purpose. I’d accept that, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
All in all, there are themes and jokes and conundrums that are human AF in BLKS. It is GIRLS with melanin (minus the trust funds). It deserved the full attention of the cast. I felt it got the doomscroll-during-Netflix treatment, however.
There will always be a next time. I hope I haven’t made anyone curse me out. It’s okay, though. That’s allowed.
Buy tickets HERE
Main photo by Aaron Sutten
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