There seems to be an endless stream of theater in New York about racial issues prior to the Civil Rights Act and beyond. Many of them are musicals and quite a number I’ve seen focus on the Freedom Riders. Broadbend, Arkansas is another one. This one aims for chamber piece. The show is baffling, incoherent, poorly staged and seems to lack a reason to exist.
Act I takes place in 1961. Benny (Justin Cunningham) is an orderly in a nursing home. He takes care of “ornery white women.” There is a lot of time spent on a story of two of them. One is a patient. The other is Julynne, the woman who runs the facility. There is a bizarre storyline about the two women fighting over the love of a dead man. Benny tells and sings about all of this.
Benny has twin daughters but hears the calling of a movement gathering momentum. He decides to meet up with the Freedom Riders who are riding interstate buses to protest the non-enforcement of civil rights laws. He is killed by a white police officer for no reason during a traffic stop. None of this has any dramatic tension whatsoever. The spoken theme is obvious: “when you are after justice, you do what it takes.”
His daughters were raised by Julynne who ran the nursing home. In the second act, his daughter Ruby travels to a cemetery where Benny and Julynne are buried next to each other. The time is 1988. Ruby is grieving because her teenage son is in the hospital. He was brutally beaten by police officers who apparently were “forced” to subdue him. This act is far better than the first but it also drags on and on.
Danyel Fulton has a lovely voice and came much closer to conveying the emotional heft required of this material. To be fair, her half was clearly better written. The libretto was by Ellen Fitzhugh and Harrison David Rivers with music by Ted Shen.
There is no set, just a couple of chairs. There is not a set designer credited but there is a “scenic consultant.” The placement of the chairs? The orchestra sits behind the large platform. That was ill advised since I found myself watching them playing an intermittently enjoyable jazzy score. The material is deadly serious but totally confusing. Placing this unfocused material on a completely bare stage is so odd as to be impossible to fathom.
In every show, there are nuggets to be savored. Ruby discusses what it’s like to be a black girl in a mixed race school as a child. She shares her thoughts when asked, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” She just picks someone else’s answer. As a minority she knows “some people’s dreams are less like dreams and more like a foregone conclusion.” An insightful and effective line. You have to search hard – and stay very focused – to hear them.
I am an enormous fan of the Transport Group’s work and Jack Cummings III who directed this misguided effort. This company has been on a tear recently with exceptional productions including Renascence, Summer and Smoke, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine and Picnic. I understand that the point being made in Broadbend, Arkansas relates to our continuing national strife over racism. “We must get back on that bus.” Theater cannot simply topical and relevant. It also has to be far, far better than this to be recommended. Frankly, I was blown away that this show was so awful.
Broadbend, Arkansas is playing at the Duke on 42nd Street until November, 23, 2019.