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‘Stick Fly’ @ True Colors
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW. Grade: D+
The LeVays seem to have it all. The men are rich and good-looking. They have Ivy League educations and a house on Martha’s Vineyard. They have servants. Oh, and by the way, the LeVays are black.
In a perfect world, skin tone wouldn’t make any difference. But playwright Lydia R. Diamond’s “Stick Fly” is a domestic powder keg that derives its tension and heat by stirring together elements of race, adultery, hypocrisy and family dysfunction.
At first glance, this True Colors Theatre production looks like a sendup of the African-American middle class, which, based on the evidence here, seems to be as shallow and materialistic as its white counterpart. But what Diamond has in mind is far more than just a gentle poke at the brand-consciousness and navel-gazing of the elite.
The trouble in this seaside paradise doesn’t begin when the elder son (Javon Johnson) brings home a white girlfriend (Elizabeth Wells Berkes), but when the sensitive younger son (Jahi Kearse) introduces his fiancee (Je Nie Fleming), whose abandonment issues ultimately reveal her to have a good deal in common with the daughter of the family maid (Ayesha Ngaujah).
If you’ve watched a daytime soap, you won’t have any trouble predicting where the story of imperious patriarch Joe LeVay (GregAlan Williams) is going —- particularly since Diamond drops plenty of hints. Though director Derrick Sanders keeps the drama on track, “Stick Fly” is a tedious, derivative and virtually humorless train wreck of a play overstuffed with issues, status jokes and gratuitous, lukewarm sex.
Novel-writing son Kent (Kearse) is vintage Tennessee Williams. His strident girlfriend Taylor (Fleming) is pure Lorraine Hansberry. Joe is an upscale version of August Wilson’s Troy Maxon. And so on. Though you understand how True Colors wants to identify emerging voices, this choice is a befuddlement. Men are pigs. Women and children suffer. Tell us something new.
THE 411: 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. Saturdays; 7:30 p.m. Sundays. Through June 3. $20. True Colors Theatre, Balzer Theater at Herren’s, 84 Luckie St., Atlanta. 768-528-1500, truecolorstheatrecompany.com.
THE VERDICT: A big mess.
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