[ssba]
The Bitter Game
Reviewed by Mayank Keshaviah
Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts
Closed
RECOMMENDED
Keith A. Wallace doesn’t just create a show; he creates an experience. For starters, the staging of The Bitter Game on the terrace outside The Wallis feels like a block party; it’s complete with hopscotch and sidewalk chalk, Double-Dutch ropes, coolers full of refreshments, tables set up with games of checkers and cards, a basketball hoop, and a DJ spinning tunes. The traffic that speeds by on Cañon Drive and Santa Monica Boulevard only adds to the ambience. But more than mise-en-scène, the experience that Wallace creates (along with co-creator Deborah Stein and director Malika Oyetimein) has to do with taking us on a traumatic journey that simulates being an innocent person unfairly targeted by the police. For people of color in America it’s a familiar experience — one with often tragic consequences that remind us that black lives still don’t matter enough.
Before things go south, however, Wallace — sporting a hoodie and a 76ers hat — introduces us to his North Philadelphia neighborhood in a way that’s reminiscent of the opening from Spike Lee’s seminal film Do the Right Thing. Like Lee’s character of Mookie, Wallace’s Jamel Smith strikes a balance between mischievously playful and serious as he describes his community in beautifully imagistic ways (‘fire hydrants spraying holy water, baptizing the neighborhood kids’). At their block party, 8-year-old Jamel and his neighbors are “just runnin’ ball, barbequin’, listenin’ to music” when gunfire rings out. Ducking for cover, Jamel sees a real gun for the first time in his life, and something about it captivates him.
Buzzer. End of the first quarter. Did I mention the show is structured as a basketball game?
As the second quarter opens, the audience is led to another part of the terrace where Wallace, now playing Jamel’s mother Pam, quickly takes Jamel to task when she catches him with a toy gun in the house. It’s at this point that she has to give him “the talk,” the tragically necessary discussion all black parents have with their kids. In it, she soberly schools Jamel on how to play ‘the bitter game,’ the strategy employed by black people to stay alive in encounters with the police: “Keep your head up. Keep your eyes forward. Keep your ego down.”
Just as things become somber, Wallace switches up the script and uses “halftime” to create a Soul Train line of audience members, handing out prizes to selected volunteers who show off their dance moves. It’s in moments like these that Wallace showcases his skill as part performer, part M.C. — shifting moods and emotions on a dime.
In the third quarter, an older Jamel is back from Vassar College and has rented a car to take his mother to her 50th birthday celebration. His plans quickly go awry when he is tailed by cops and eventually pulled over. Wallace’s portrayal of Jamel’s emotions as he deals with the police relay the sense of what PTSD must feel like in real time. He follows the lessons his mother has instilled in him, playing the game as best he can, but the dehumanizing abuse by the brutes in blue proves to be too much. In the end, the image of his 76ers hat lying on the ground in a police spotlight speaks volumes.
The remainder of the show — the fourth quarter and “overtime” — becomes an effort to implicate us in this tragedy. As Pam, Wallace makes an impassioned plea at her son’s memorial; she tells us that “white silence is violence,” and asks theatergoers to record her words on their phones, share them with the world, and then do something to change the system because white people actually have the power to do so. She also hands out candles and has us repeat the familiar names of those who have been victims of police brutality: Mike Brown, Sandra Bland, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and on and on…
Finally, we come full circle to the ex-con whose gun first captured young Jamel’s fascination at the block party. Like a character out of an August Wilson play, he gives us “the history of America according to my black ass.” He waxes philosophical on the criminal “justice” system, reminding us that “this whole shit was rigged from the jump” and that “riots are the voice of the unheard, the forgotten.”
While his words are powerful and resonant, what makes the show truly unique is that it places audience members in the shoes of those whose lives are different and more difficult — and points the way for them to do something to improve them.
Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills; Wed.-Sat., 7:30 p.m.; closed. https://www.thewallis.org/bitter. Running time: one hour with no intermission.
