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I Am Not Sam

Reviewed by Deborah Klugman

The Space

Through August 2

RECOMMENDED:

Michael Phillip Edwards’s fiery one-person play is less a drama in the traditional sense than a blistering rumination on identity and race, and the toll racism takes on American men of color. Its urgency erupts not from events per se but from the inner dialogue of the pivotal speaker, an elderly black man named Sam who simultaneously burns with racial pride and shame.  

Edwards’s characters include Sam, his white middle-class son-in-law, a lawyer, and his mixed-race grandson, Benjamin, who was once a college football player and now an actor with enough film credits to be recognized –- well, sort of –- by the guards who monitor the prison cell where he now finds himself. We also meet Benjamin as Benji — later in the play but earlier in the family’s chronicle — as the (unseen) receiver of several of Sam’s rants.  

Though Edwards alternates among these three and several other minor characters, it is Sam who commands the stage most often. A heavy drinker and misogynist, he’s prompted by the question from 10 year old Benji, “What is black?” He holds forth on the topic with searing invective. Sam’s interpretation of the roots of the horrendous schism between black people and white is framed in his revisionist telling of the Tower of Babel myth, in which a resentful, bungling and uncaring God initiates the whole interracial mess.

The play’s conflagrant language and compelling rhythms are matched by a singular and fevered performance that nonetheless could use calibrating. Directed by Tamika Lamison, there’s such intensity from the start that there’s not really room to build. The catharsis, when it comes, is yet another explosive moment.

And while our experience of Benjamin in prison reiterates a terrible and timely point about police abuse-of-power, the story could only have been enriched if we knew exactly why and how he had come to be there — the precise circumstances, as it were.

I Am Not Sam is an eloquent 50 minute rendering of the psychological and spiritual damage sustained by men of color. It has many powerful elements. I wonder how much more formidable it might be if developed with three performers and a more meticulously constructed narrative.

The Space, 547 Lindley Place, Dwntwn.; Fri. –Sat. 8 pm., through Aug. 2., mpwedwards@gmail.com