One Monkey Don't Stop No Show

Synopsis

Set in a middle-class upwardly mobile Black family in late 1970s Philadelphia, USA this brilliant comedy is an exploration of class and gender in a middle class community. The Reverend Avery Harrison, a Baptist preacher, clings to his position in the local black elite. His upwardly mobile philosophy is avidly shared by his wife, Myra (an insightful reimagining of Mrs Malaprop), and by his son Felix, a ‘preppy’, privately educated college boy. Their comfortable world is shaken when Beverly, the only daughter of Avery’s recently deceased brother, arrives from the rural South. Her father has left her in the custody of Caleb Johnson, a street-wise, fast living man who was the partner of Beverly’s father in a disreputable local nightclub. If Caleb is to keep his shares in the club he has to look after Beverly till she comes of age - but Beverly has other ideas. Beverly’s razor sharp common sense attitude to life affects all the household as the Reverend and his wife find there is more to life than money and status; Felix falls for the local charmer "Li Bits" and Caleb finds himself increasingly helpless in Beverlys’ presence.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 18 January 2013

Don Evans, an African American playwright and professor who died ten years ago, is an interesting discovery, a Philadelphian comic counterweight, perhaps, to August Wilson and his Pittsburgh plays which the Tricycle promoted so memorably before the verbatim documentary dramas came along.

Evans' One Monkey Don't Stop No Show is a 1970s satirical comedy about middle-class black Philadelphians thrown into moral chaos when sex rears its bobbing head and a preacher's virginal niece from the rural South hooks up with his dead brother's business partner in a shady nightclub.

It's much more Molière than The Cosby Show, which Dawn Walton's production for the touring Eclipse Theatre Company mistakenly evokes in its publicity, along with Restoration comedy; this results in the disastrous framework of a "live" recorded sit-com in which the acting is stylised but grotesque, we are the studio audience, dummy, and characters come and go to canned laught...

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Latest User Review

Gary - 18 January 2013:

I was lucky enough to get tickets for the press night. Great show, good to see Karl Collins ex Bill star, on stage and giving a great performance. Highly recommend you go and see....

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