Yellowman

NOTE: The following review dates from May 2004 and this production’s earlier run at Liverpool and London’s Hampstead Theatre. For current casting information, see performance listings.

Like Sebastian Barry’s Whistling Pysche, recently premiered at the
Almeida, Yellowman unfolds as a series of intertwining monologues
from two characters. But Dael Orlandersmith‘s memory play is at once more
accessible, less densely textured and ultimately far more powerful.

As it intricately weaves a thoughtful, reflective and poetic drama out of
the story it charts of the romantic progress of two black childhood
sweethearts in a small South Carolina town, St Stephen, in the 1960s, they
enact not just themselves at different periods of their lives, but also
other members of their families. It’s a kind of {Stones in His
Pockets::E01048796670}, but with fewer jokes.

From their first sighting of each other as respectively second and fourth
graders, the dark-skinned Alma (Cecilia Noble) and the lighter-skinned
Eugene (Kevin Harvey) instantly become friends. Later, at 14, her
developing breasts awaken his 16-year-old desires. Her departure for the big
city of New York to study at Hunter College enforces their separation, but
far more ultimately cataclysmic is the death of his grandfather, and the
violent fissures it exposes in Eugene’s relationship with his father.

But there are also dark undercurrents within their own feelings about
themselves – and the monologue device, which ideally gives shape and form to
expressing their doubts, has Alma, for instance, who sees herself as “dark
and big”, praying to be “light and small”. Eugene, too, has a cross to bear
in being lighter skinned: the resentment of his father, who isn’t.

In this painful, disturbing portrait of damaged lives, Orlandersmith’s play
exposes and provokes hidden feelings of internalised racism. But though the
subject is sometimes earnest, Noble and Harvey act it with lightness and
grace, conviction and power.

Indhu Rubasingham‘s production, played out in front of Liz Ascroft‘s
atmospheric clapboard house, is alive to the changing moods of a play in the
textured lighting of Chris Davey and the musical punctuation of Paul
Englishby.

– Mark Shenton