This is a week of inherited trauma. It sees the revamped Donmar Warehouse reopen with Cordelia Lynn’s new work about a couple possessed by the violent atrocity experienced by their Polish and Jewish forebears.
But first comes the UK debut of Suzan-Lori Parks’s play. Populated by two mixed-race couples, it is a shocker. Those who know the work of the Pulitzer-winning Park, such as her slave-era epic Father Comes Home from the Wars, will expect a racially charged evening.
But even after it is established early on that insomniac African American artist Leo (a likeable Ken Nwosu) has been been assaulted by the police during one of his nightly walkabouts, it still feels as if the author has opted to write a comedy of manners. That is until Leo reveals his solution to the vulnerability he feels when out on the streets of his city because he is a black man.
The solution to his insecurity is simple. He wants to be the slave of his best friend Ralph (James Corrigan), a white man.
Once the shock of Leo’s suggestion has time to settle with his lawyer girlfriend Dawn (Helena Wilson), the incredulous Ralph (James Corrigan) and Ralph’s stunned girlfriend Misha (Faith Omole) who is black, the logic of Leo’s idea slowly becomes credible.
Though the play opened in New York in 2019 it channels much of the daily despair that many whites only became aware of following the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
Leo’s argument is that black people had more protection from the law as property than they do today as people.
It helps that Leo frames the idea as an experiment to last no longer than a biblical forty days and forty nights.
But it his reasoning that is so difficult to refute. “I’ll take myself to the lowest place and know forever after that, if I can bear it, then I can bear anything.”
The unintentional effect of Leo’s declaration of intent is that it challenges the woke credentials of his peers. The intentional effect of Parks’s play however is that it does the same to her audience.
The lives of both her on-stage inter-racial couples are informed by knotty, racially charged dilemmas.
Dawn is a liberal lawyer whose current case is to defend a black young man accused of murder. Yet when she attempts to help Misha with her provocatively titled YouTube channel Ask A Black, she cannot help but be patronising.
Worse still, Ralph throws himself into the role of Master with terrifying commitment. His resentment at losing out in his job application to someone he suspect was preferred because they are not white drives his missplaced sense of social injustice, made even more ludicrous by Parks because Ralph is the heir to a fortune.
Granted, his shooting range in which the couple gather for target practise and to hang out feels like a slightly unfocused critique of Americanism. But physically at least it is superbly integrated into Polly Findlay’s production by Lizzie Clachan’s design. More to the point it is no barrier to Parks’s achievement - to make even this liberal, mainly white audience, question their complicity in Leo’s despair.
