‘A First Breeze’ Blows Through Again

Ostensibly a dissection of a middle-class black family over the course of a long hot weekend, Leslie Lee’s award-winning “The First Breeze of Summer” also looks backward at the tempestuous life of the family’s fading matriarch. A similar attempt at modern-day commemoration, as it happens, is taking place at the Signature Theatre. Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s incisive revival of the 1975 drama marks the beginning of a season devoted to the Negro Ensemble Company, the pioneering group that launched “First Breeze” and so many other pivotal works.The NEC has fallen on some lean years lately, but there was a period where virtually every black stage actor, writer, director, and designer of note came up through its ranks. And so the Signature, in a break from its usual policy of devoting each season to a single playwright, has decided to honor the 41-year-old troupe with revivals of three of its better-known works. With 14 actors spilling in and out of Lucretia’s modest home, “First Breeze” is the sort of sprawling, loose-limbed ensemble piece that has all but vanished from the stage today. Its reappearance, lumps and all, is as welcome a gift to parched theatergoers as the cool gust that gives the play its name.In effect, Lucretia (a still-vibrant Leslie Uggams) sees her sexual life flash before her — and our — eyes as a series of vignettes introduces the three men who love and leave the shy young woman (played by “America’s Next Top Model” runner-up Yaya DaCosta). There’s the fast-talking, proud Sam Green (Gilbert Owuor), whom Lucretia would later claim as her husband; Briton Woodward (Quincy Dunn-Baker), an unstable member of the white family that employed her as a maid; and finally Harper Edwards (John Earl Jelks), a tongue-tied minister who comes closest to becoming Lucretia’s savior until the way of all flesh gets in the way.What differentiates “First Breeze” from so many other domestic dramas is the way this same preoccupation with sin and rectitude filters down through the generations. Lou (Jason Dirden), an earnest, awkward high school student, is unable to reconcile his saintly image of his grandma — his Scrabble partner and constant supporter — with the rawer, randier truth. Despite prudent counseling from his worldly older brother, Nate (Brandon Dirden, Jason’s real-life brother), too many scales fall from Lou’s eyes all at once, and Mr. Lee takes a somewhat questionable turn toward melodrama at the play’s conclusion.The author’s allegiances show through most starkly during the flashbacks; it’s as if a past and a personality is asking too much for Lucretia. She remains a lovely blank through nearly all of these scenes, while the men strut and stammer their way into the foreground. Despite this disparity, however, the willowy Ms. DaCosta is quite effective, and Messrs. Jelks and Owuor are splendid as two very different suitors. Ms. Uggams, for her part, builds upon Ms. DaCosta’s sturdy foundation with a warm but not treacly interpretation of the saintly-grandma role; the conflicting emotions that accompanied each of Lucretia’s pregnancies carry through to her interactions with the two living children, now grown-up, who were born from them.And Mr. Lee gets so much right that the occasional longueurs quickly fade from memory. For one thing, there’s his wise take on the pervasive and ultimately slippery role of religion in the family. The play’s highlight is a kitchen-table prayer session that starts out as a humorous look at familial discomfort and explodes into a whole-body conversion for Lou. A sort of encompassing grace fills the scene in a way that a more traditional religious setting might not; surrounded by the bric-a-brac and photographs of a lifetime, Lou and his relatives achieve a state of receptivity that leaves the door wide open for God.Credit for this goes in part to music director Bill Sims Jr.’s deft overlay of spirituals, and in part to the work of set designer Michael Carnahan, whose furniture looks like it knows exactly which relative will be sliding into which cushion. Mr. Santiago-Hudson understands when to mask some of Mr. Lee’s more stilted passages and when to let the material stretch its legs. (As with so many plays from the period, the running time creeps toward the three-hour mark.) And while not every supporting player stays entirely within the bounds of naturalism, Jason Dirden leads a powerful set of younger actors while Keith Randolph Smith and Marva Hicks shine as Lou and Nate’s struggling but largely content parents.The next two Signature productions, Samm-Art Williams’s “Home” and Charles Fuller’s “Zooman and the Sign,” are considerably better-known NEC offerings than “First Breeze.” Given Mr. Santiago-Hudson’s success with this often musty memory play, the future looks bright indeed for the company’s season-long tribute. The Negro Ensemble Company has never really gone away — it relocated to Harlem earlier this year — but the Signature’s lavish attentions nonetheless qualify as a homecoming.* * *Every summer, while the Fringe Festival seeps into seemingly every crevice south of 14th Street like sand in a beach house, one downtown space — the Ohio Theatre — stays Fringe-free but every bit as adventurous. That’s where Soho Think Tank sponsors its shrewdly curated Ice Factory festival, showcasing seven productions, four performances each: From these snug surroundings have emerged major new works by adventurous companies like the Flying Machine, Rude Mechanicals, and Elevator Repair Service.The Riot Group, the final presenter in this year’s seven-week festival, detonated a series of verbal hand grenades in 2004 with Adriano Shaplin’s “Pugilist Specialist,” a four-character play about a covert Middle Eastern assassination attempt. Its aphoristic, jargony torrents of language rat-a-tatted into listeners’ brains with bravura and a keen ear for Orwellian obfuscation. Now the same four actors (including Mr. Shaplin himself) have unleashed their latest head-spinner, the TV-news satire “Victory at the Dirt Palace.” And while the sound and fury are nearly as potent, the tale being told signifies considerably less.The Shakespearean reference is apt, as Mr. Shaplin has included several snippets from “King Lear” in his blood feud between the 30-year veteran newsman James Mann (Paul Schnabel), who delivers “America’s occasionally upsetting bedtime story,” and his chilly daughter, K (Stephanie Viola), for ratings supremacy. While father, daughter, and their respective flunkies (Andrew Friedman and Mr. Shaplin) jockey for power, a September 11-type attack rallies all four to brief — and no less disingenuous — heights of rhetorical gibberish. But these terrorist attacks never really become more than a punch line, and no matter how strong the Manns’ Oedipal rage gets (racy pictures of K find their way to the sputtering James), it’s hard to give overnight Nielsen ratings anything like the jolt of the ill-defined but nonetheless harrowing mission in “Pugilist Specialist.” The text flounders midway through, dissipating much of the word-stuffed dynamism that Mr. Shaplin and his talented cast display so effortlessly in the play’s first half hour. Still, his baroque tendrils of language prove eerily simpatico with Shakespeare’s pentameter, and director Whit MacLaughlin musters an antiseptic precision that both serves and brackets the material. (Mr. Shaplin also contributed the eerie sound design; the set and lights are by Maria Shaplin.) All four actors bounce smoothly from philosophy to invective to broadcast gobbledygook, and Mr. Shaplin’s digs at banal “news you can use” hit their mark. (“Drugs: Companies make them. You take them. Who’s complaining? The answer is: Some people.”) Even when the Riot Group aims small, it thinks big and performs even bigger.“The First Breeze of Summer” until September 28 (555 W. 42nd St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-244-7529). “Victory at the Dirt Palace” until Saturday (66 Wooster Street, between Spring and Broome streets, 212-868-4444).

‘A First Breeze’ Blows Through Again

‘A First Breeze’ Blows Through Again

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