Jitney

Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
Mark Taper Forum
Extended through December 29

RECOMMENDED:

As with all of August Wilson’s work, Jitney provides an intimate look at a close-knit community of African-Americans as they go about their lives. Written in 1982, it was the first play conceived for the Pittsburgh Cycle, his epic 10-play chronicle set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, the neighborhood the playwright as a boy called home. Set in the 1970s, Jitneywas revised at least twice (doubtless with many more iterations) before it was finally produced on Broadway in 2017 with Ruben Santiago-Hudson directing. The touring production currently at the Mark Taper Forum features several actors from that Broadway cast, plus the entire production and design package, including David Gallo’s scenic design, Bill Sims Jr.’s original score, and director Santiago-Hudson at the helm. While there is much to love, not all the performances are equally good, and some of the strained plot points are not so easy to overlook.

Jitney takes place in the rundown office of a gypsy cab company owned and managed by Becker (Steven Anthony Jones) — a good, honest man who sometimes intervenes when the drivers working under his aegis fall out over one thing or another. They’re an assorted group of mostly old-timers: busybody Turnbo (Ray Anthony Thomas), who’s always picking a fight with the youngster in the group; 24-year-old Youngblood (Amari Cheatom); the perpetually inebriated Fielding (Anthony Chisholm), forever trying to con a couple of bucks from somebody; and Doub (Keith Randolph Smith), a clear-headed guy who hasn’t time for the troublemaking Turnbo and tells him so. Then there are the non-employees: Shealy (Harvy Blanks), the voluble bookie still searching for the woman who will make him forget his estranged wife of 22 years; and Philmore (Brian D. Coats), an occasional drop-in with marital problems of his own. The sole female character is Youngblood’s frustrated spouse Rena (Nija Okoro), who comes in to hunt down her elusive husband after he filches the grocery money for unexplained “debts,” then finds herself fending off the insinuating advances of the self-deluding Turnbo.

But Jitney‘s weightiest and most pivotal plotline has to do with Becker and his son Booster (Francois Battiste), newly released from prison after 20 years behind bars for shooting a white woman who had falsely accused him of rape. Booster, a college student when he committed the crime, comes looking for reconciliation with his dad, who never attended the trial and never once visited him in prison. That’s because Becker blames Booster for the death of his mother, who survived her son’s guilty verdict by only three weeks. He’s also still smarting from the shaming of his good name (as he sees it) brought on by the rash act of a son in whom he’d vested so much hope. And, humiliation and grief aside, there’s the fact of the murder itself, which Becker cannot sanction.

All this comes pouring out in a scene easily the evening’s dramatic highlight but also its weakest link. Heretofore mildly mannered, a furious Becker now confronts his son with riveting intensity. Booster defends himself — but without remorse. He accuses his dad of not being there for his mother when she desperately needed his support. He also rationalizes the killing as a matter of honor: Rather than be punished for rape, a crime he did not commit, he prefers to pay for a crime that he did — and take revenge for the lie at the same time. He also argues unconvincingly that in this act he was not only preserving his own honor but that of his family name.

And herein lies the rub, for me: It’s hard to condone the premeditated taking of a life (unless, perhaps, the stakes are saving the lives of others), especially if there’s no sense of repentance. Yet the relationship between these two characters, their dialectic, the sense of pathos Wilson sought to create, and the connection of both these elements to the play’s final climactic moment where the torch is supposedly passed, is the spine of the story. Jones’s gripping performance notwithstanding, the faceoff comes off more as an idea vehicle that a lesser playwright might construct, and less the seamless storytelling that Wilson is famous for. Nor does it help that Battiste’s take on Booster lacks vitality; the character is too tentative to be compelling.

As Youngblood, Cheatom does fine as a young guy whose buttons are continually pushed by the meddlesome Turnbo, but it’s a shorthand depiction of this character who is looking to change his life. I also didn’t get a sense of intimacy between Youngblood and Rena.

All that said, there are many more reasons to love this production than not, and they’re found in the kaleidoscopic performances of Thomas, Fielding, Smith, Coats and Blanks, as well as Jones — all seasoned actors who understand and can embody the tragicomic rhythms and truths of Wilson’s work. Jones and Thomas are standouts.

David Gallo’s set is notable not only for the dingy interior that is the focal point for these characters’ lives, but for how this interior is framed, within a cityscape of row houses of faded brick and beat up old cars, and with the steeple of a church rising just across the way.

Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Downtown L.A.–Civic Center; Tues.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2:30 p.m.; Sun., 1 p.m. & 6 p.m.; extended through Dec. 29. (213) 628-2772 or www.centertheatregroup.org. Running time: two hours and 30 minutes with an intermission.