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| Treavor Boykin and Faith Russell in Slip/Shot (PaulBestock) |
Slip/Shot
Through October 12, 2014
(As printed in Seattle Gay News)
Seattle Public Theater often combines great technical design
(especially for a mid-sized theater) and challenging and well-done productions.
Some of the best in town. It’s easy to see why they might choose to do the play
Slip/Shot by Jacqueline Goldfinger: A
security guard shoots an unarmed African-American teen and claims it is an
accident. It sounds like it would be an extremely topical and challenging play.
Though written around 2012, Goldfinger sets the action in
1960s small town southern America. Some dialogue is poetic, some sociologically
relevant (women were expected to stay home and take care of their husbands),
and the script probably reads well. Unfortunately, it disappoints.
However, the production at SPT is well-cast with excellent
actors, with not a false acting note among them.
(That premise is quite different from the current
circumstances of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. Neither of those teens was
accidentally shot. Goldfinger’s script does not evoke, then, current and
unjustified shootings.)
Clem has a father who is clearly racist, though we never
meet him, and Clem wants to distance himself from the legacy of his father, and
the shooting seems to make him feel like he’s accidentally done something his
father would condone. However, that theme – wanting to disassociate from
parents – is not fleshed out in any significant or informative way.
The librarian seems grieved that her son is dead, but reacts
with hostility to Euphrasie voicing outrage over the death. This seems overly
conciliatory to the social order, even for a compliant 1960s. The town sheriff
(Roy Stanton) tells Clem and Kitty
to lock themselves at home in case a reactive black community becomes
threatening, yet no further development of that plot occurs, either.
Goldfinger’s script calls for a single kitchen set which is
used by both the white couple and the AfricanAmerican woman and her family to
represent their respective kitchens. The door that moves into and away from view
on the left side of the stage is the entrance to the AfricanAmerican family’s
kitchen and the door that moves into and away from view on
the right side of the stage is the entrance to the white couple’s kitchen. The
technical effort of having two very, very slow moving kitchen doors exchange
sides (mechanically moving into and away from the set) is lugubrious in the
extreme and hampers this production.
There are so many topics the script could have tackled just
from the structure Goldfinger created: black/white relationships in the 1960s
(the play does not help us understand that), the legacy of the parent/child
relationship, law enforcement in the 1960s, women’s roles in the 1960s, small
town biases, what forgiveness looks like and whether it is possible in this
situation, the list goes on. Goldfinger does not shed any light on these.
Again, the acting was fine, including Trevor Cushman as a guard friend of Clem’s who seems to be in love
with Kitty. The set design was fine (designed by Craig Wollam), the costumes (Chelsea
Cook) and sound (Andre Nelson
and Evan Mosher) and lighting (Paul Arnold) were fine. In the main,
the directing (Kelly Kitchens) was
fine, though some directing choices seem to have emphasized empty lengths of
time. So, the main disapointment must be a script appearing to be better on the
page than on the stage.
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