Neighbors

Synopsis

"I am having issue with the kind of people they are and where they came from and how that will reflect upon us, in the eyes of people who aren't us, because of those other people's own issues." Jean has a black husband. Richard has a wife who happens to be white. They have new neighbours. Tensions mount and stereotypes are brutally exposed as Richard, Jean and their bi-racial daughter Melody meet their neighbours; the crazy Crow family. This bold and explosive contemporary play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a wildly theatrical comedy exploring identity, intolerance and the tensions in a 'post racial' America.

Our Review:

Paul Couch - 4 May 2013

It’s a bold director who, in these racially sensitive times, chooses a play in which five of the eight characters ‘black up’ as side-show minstrels. However, when the director is High Tide’s Stephen Atkinson, and the five actors in question are of Afro-Caribbean ethnicity anyway, the rules of political correctness become inevitably skewed.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Neighbors is a curious inclusion for the High Tide festival. First produced in 2010, it’s hardly a new play, but this outing is its European premiere and so its presence is vindicated on that score alone. However, this is a fully-formed and challenging piece of theatre that draws its audience in with overt slapstick humour on one hand and po-faced soap-opera culture on the other, before bringing the two worlds together in a Twilight Zone-style fusion that coaxes and snares the sensibilities.

Richard and Jean Harrison – he black, she white – have moved to a suburb of an unnamed city o...

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