{"id":79803,"date":"2019-02-25T22:25:42","date_gmt":"2019-02-26T03:25:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gayfriendschat.com\/socialblog\/inherited-histories-explode-in-dynamite-marys-seacole-off-broadway-review\/"},"modified":"2019-02-25T22:25:42","modified_gmt":"2019-02-26T03:25:42","slug":"inherited-histories-explode-in-dynamite-marys-seacole-off-broadway-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gayfriendschat.com\/socialblog\/inherited-histories-explode-in-dynamite-marys-seacole-off-broadway-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Inherited Histories Explode in Dynamite \u2018Marys Seacole\u2019 Off-Broadway: REVIEW"},"content":{"rendered":"

Inherited Histories Explode in Dynamite \u2018Marys Seacole\u2019 Off-Broadway: REVIEW<\/b><\/p>\n

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When \u201cI\u2019m Every Woman\u201d rings out triumphantly over Marys Seacole<\/em>, an astonishing, history-exploding new play by Jackie Sibblies Drury, Whitney Houston has never sounded so apt. And not simply because every member of this remarkable six-woman<\/a> cast walks around in the same pair of sensible pink sneakers. <\/p>\n

The subject of Drury\u2019s play, which opens off-Broadway tonight at Lincoln Center\u2019s LCT3, is Mary Seacole, a Jamaican-born healer, businesswoman, and author of an 1857 travel memoir. After Florence Nightingale refused her services, Seacole set up her own hotel to care for British soldiers during the Crimean War. Victorian Britain came to revere her, to the extent that it could a creole woman<\/a>. \u201cIf you don\u2019t know who she is,\u201d Drury\u2019s script reads, \u201clook her the f**k up.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Audiences will know a great deal more about her by the end of these electrifying 90 minutes. They\u2019ll also be compelled to reckon, in ways both thrilling and primal, with mortality, motherhood, ancestral and colonial legacies, and no less than what it means to be any kind of woman<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Mary (a searing Quincy Tyler Bernstine) introduces herself from a modest pedestal, heaving off her shoulders the weight of untold histories to give it to us straight. \u201cI am the only historian of myself and my accomplishments, and so I shall try to speak from my own experience, simply,\u201d as she later puts it. Mary soon sheds her 19th-century finery to reveal present-day nurse\u2019s scrubs, in which she\u2019ll change the sheets of a dying woman<\/a> who\u2019s just shit the bed. <\/p>\n

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With one step off Mary\u2019s pedestal, Drury traces an ancestral line between a woman<\/a> renowned for tending to British sons and daughters to an immigrant service provider tasked with both emotional labor and dirty work no one else wants to do. In both centuries, Mary is serving white women<\/a> (and men<\/a>) who amount to equal part patron and succubus \u2014 furnishing her means to survive while siphoning off her human dignity. Ultimately it\u2019s the same shit, different era. <\/p>\n

Drury bends, suspends, and ultimately shatters conventions of time and space altogether, in order to tease out threads of inheritance systematically overlooked by the churn of western history. Somehow the play is also a total hoot. This is a spectacular feat, accomplished with a sharp sort of expressionism by director Lileana Blain-Cruz. A nurse\u2019s station transforms into a rum-soaked bar at a convalescent resort on Jamaican shores. The glass partition to a waiting room also demarcates a liminal space of elegiac memories. <\/p>\n

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A maternal woman<\/a> in Victorian black, referred to in the script as \u2018Drury\u2019 or spirit Mary, affixes Mary with a bluetooth earpiece when she steps into the present, a first puncture through time that lands with a laugh. Mary\u2019s ancestral mother proceeds to haunt her with sporadic dropped phone calls<\/a>. Yes, history, it seems, has Mary\u2019s number on speed dial. It\u2019s just the wry sort of gesture that makes Marys Seacole<\/em> so exhilarating to watch, waiting to see what facet of the truth it\u2019s about to reveal next.<\/p>\n

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Follow Naveen Kumar on Twitter: @Mr_NaveenKumar<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

(photos: julieta cervantes)<\/p>\n

The post Inherited Histories Explode in Dynamite \u2018Marys Seacole\u2019 Off-Broadway: REVIEW<\/a> appeared first on Towleroad Gay News<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Inherited Histories Explode in Dynamite \u2018Marys Seacole\u2019 Off-Broadway: REVIEW<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n