Nice … In the name of some bullshit cause … To steal capitalist dollars in the name of third-world democracy.” Kenyatta cringes at his daughter’s impenetrable cynicism. Nina’s mother, a renowned Black Power activist named Ashanti X, wrote them to Nina’s father while he was in prison - “for … what was it again?” Nina taunts Kenyatta when, recently released after many years, he shows up at her door hoping to read what his lover wrote. Nina, says the character description in Morisseau’s script, “has a lifetime of walls up and will fight you before letting them down.” While that’s emotionally credible, the play made up of these fights, one after another, serious-faced and world-weary, starts to feel stodgy, its potential for oomph and poignancy sputtering like a flame with too little oxygen.Īt the center of most of Sunset Baby’s altercations is a collection of letters. Both are guarded, solemn, and intense, molded by different kinds of suffering. Compounding this issue is the fact that Simone, along with being “full of brilliance and torment … beauty and power,” as Nina’s father Kenyatta (Russell Hornsby) says, had a wickedly sharp sense of humor, a quality neither Kenyatta nor Nina possesses. Simone’s songs are so rich, so devastating, so unmistakable, that they demand a dramatic context that rises to meet them in all their raw complexity, and Sunset Baby doesn’t quite get there. Although that may seem like the obvious move, it sets too high a bar. Keys (Morisseau’s husband) have reached deep into the singer’s catalog to score the production. It may be that the show is starting at a disadvantage: Its protagonist, Nina (Moses Ingram, wearing the emotional equivalent of body armor) was named by her activist parents for Nina Simone, and co-sound designers Curtis Craig and J. It’s long on argument but short on a more expansive, less literal expression of drama. Broadnax III’s even-keeled direction renders up a production that’s less theatrical than it is rhetorical. Its story deals with competing poles of activism and cynicism - the grave risks of both softness and hardness in the lives of a former leader in the Black Power movement, his estranged daughter, and her boyfriend - but the combination of Morisseau’s straightforward text and Steve H. A three-hander that takes place in a present-day East New York housing-project apartment, the show is thematically weighty yet formally thin. Currently, Signature is reviving one of Morisseau’s early plays, Sunset Baby, which made its premiere at the LAByrinth Theater Company in 2013.
Whether or not they always come together into fully compelling pieces of theater is another question. These are the kind of chewy, relatable yet high-stakes dialogues that will populate scene-study syllabi for decades to come. In a way - and this is neither compliment nor slight - they feel a bit old-fashioned: There’s nothing postmodern about their front-footed, just-short-of-declamatory brand of realism. Her characters often get their own impassioned monologues, and her scenes are driving and vernacular, powered by clear conflict, enthusiastic shit-shooting, and canny sizing-up. Now, more than 20 years, a MacArthur grant, and a current residency at Signature Theatre later, Morisseau’s perspective as a performer is still audible in her work. In college, inspired by Ntozake Shange and frustrated by the lack of roles for Black women in the theater department at the University of Michigan, she wrote her first play, Blackness Blues: Time to Change the Tune (A Sister’s Story). Dominique Morisseau came to playwriting through acting.