born bad

born bad has no business being as good as it is. It’s a 55 minute play with highly stylized language and action in which no one really says much of anything. Six members of a family stand around a bunch of starkly lit chairs saying cryptic things for just under an hour. Five minutes in, clueless as to where anything was going, I was prepared to write it off as some wannabe Beckett nonsense with nothing to say but a whole lot of pretentious ways to say it.

And then, curiously, the pieces started to come together. The characters, I realized, weren’t talking about vague somethings; they were talking about one very specific something. Their vagueness, and how the author treated it, all related to this family’s inability to confront their secrets, whether the nearly silent father who remains uninvolved, the coolly distant mother who wants not to believe what is being said, or even the barreling force of nature Dawta, demanding to be heard, but still afraid to give voice to the specifics of what she is talking about.

As it turns out, born bad tells a story that has been told many times before. But in its presentation and its refusal to spell things out in any literal way, it finds a creeping, disturbing, beautiful, and heartbreaking way of not only dealing with the events of this one family’s past, but confronting the myriad ways in which they’ve failed to communicate with each other about them.

Thank the gods the play isn’t any longer than it is because by the end, I was deeply, wonderfully upset and moved. It’s a gutpunch of a play, but in the best, most transformative way.

The cast is Re. Dic. You. Luss. Heather Alicia Simms is the picture of righteous rage as Dawta. Quincy Tyler Bernstine who was amazing in Ruined is no less so here, balancing the most humorous character of the piece ever so carefully on the edge of this deeply tragic show. LeRoy James McLain is smashingly sweet and sincere; Crystal Dickinson is a revelation as the sister you desperately want to slap, and Elain Graham and Michael Rogers in the rather small roles of the parents, are nauseating villains all too easy to believe in.

It’s an incredible show that, like Black Watch the week before, left me shaken.