The Timely Review - Dontrell, Who Kissed the Sea
Let the first words across my lips be: this is the best play I've ever seen at APT.
I may be suffering from some recency bias, elated as I am, in the minutes and hours after walking out of the Touchstone Theatre this evening. My previous pick for best play I ever saw at APT was likely my very first, Jim DeVita's one-man, one-cello performance of An Iliad, the first run, 12 years ago. That floored me - what the heck town did I just move to? What Tony-caliber theater is apparently right around the corner from my house? But succumb, I will, gleefully, to the star of the moment: Dontrell, Who Kissed the Sea.
This season bursts with questions of purpose and meaning, destiny and regret, insanity and death. Dontrell brings it all together in an invigorating synthesis.
In the Truman Show version of reality, they really went all-out to get me, specifically, to like this. The aforementioned themes are bouncing around in my life. Dontrell is played with gravity and passion by Derrick Moore, a new friend, who has worked with me on the farm this year, with whom I have broken bread, cooked pizza, pulled weeds and planted seeds. Two women of this play, actor Jazzma Pryor and Voice and Text Coach Jacqueline Springfield, just this last week came to the barn. Jackie played the bass, Jazzma shook the shaker. Dontrell carries with him a voice recorder, his “Captain's Log” - my Star Trek-loving father was here visiting just last week - and Dontrell, when so inspired, uses it to make note to the Future by speaking aloud, as I do at this very minute, by the selfsame method.
And then there is the rhythm, the stomped step and clapped hand, the rhythmic spoken words, bouncing voice to voice, the swirling choreography and otherworldly ancestral sequences. And there is the drum, played by Jacob Alexander Craig. I nearly burst out of my seat at the final number, as questing Dontrell, drowning in the kissed sea, is brought to redemptive life by his ancestors.
I mean, if you had to pick a play to appeal to exactly me, exactly here, exactly now… they really couldn't have chosen any play but Dontrell, Who Kissed the Sea. Well-chosen, APT. Well done, everyone.
Back to the play.
Dontrell is the Black Play at American Players Theatre this season. APT has been doing a Black Play every year for some time now, a welcome addition to the repertoire of human experiences that we are invited to ponder. I gather that it is that consistency that matters most of all. Many theaters may do a Black Play every once in a while, but APT’s commitment, year after year, to bring in these actors and these artists to tell these stories, has become a flywheel, resulting in the ever-improving craft we see before us. I bet that's a part of why they won the Tony.
Dontrell is centered on a distinctively Black American sociocultural memory - people, by the millions, taken aboard a slave ship, bound for the New World, chained in a cargo hold of filth for a months-long journey towards an unimaginably bleak future.
It is a moment at the end of these months that seizes Dontrell in a dream, suddenly and implacably: one such man, in his own direct line, leaping to his death in the ocean rather than land ashore - but not before conceiving of a child.
Dontrell grows impatient and desperate, called to reunite with this man. His spirit is somewhere on the ocean floor. We learn that Dontrell’s grandfather, too, had been seized by such a quest, such a need. He drowned in the ocean, he failed at his quest, for he did not know how to swim.
The “direct line” is a line used directly in this play. Speaking not just of “the ancestors”, yours and mine, but mine and mine alone. Not the aunties and the uncles, cousins seconded and removed, but the two, then four, then eight people from whom we each are descended.
These numbers stop doubling at a certain point. You may have 16 distinct twice-great grandparents, and perhaps 32 thrice-great grandparents, but likely not 64 one layer up. You may descend from one person more than once, as six generations is near enough time for our multiplication to divide itself among the many, such that some might forget that they are even related. Less likely still, at 128 and 256, and by the time we get into the billions, it is a mathematical certainty, for there were not enough people alive on Earth in those days to each be separately related to you. We are all related, not that many generations ago. Twenty or forty thousand years is all it takes to find a common ancestor for us all - a thousand generations or two.
But here, we are concerned with the direct line, and the experience of the Middle Passage, some two to four hundred years off, involves a mere 10 or 20 generational links.
Against this not-quite-ancient-quest is composed modernity, the family. The siblings give each other grief, the family friend freestyles over a beat in the car, the father yells disrespectfully from the den, the mother shakes her head exasperatedly at it all. At one point, in a fit of familial conflict, Dontrell calls his mother a bitch. It flies through the air like a thrown stone, shatters the glass which now lies everywhere at our feet. What follows is the most difficult moment of the play, as the father, Gavin Lawrence, takes his son to another room, makes him wait while he composes his thoughts. He tells Dontrell - and perhaps persuades us - that his mother, this woman, is a warrior, as a good many good women are. Our culture lacks a word for this quality in a woman, and in its misogyny has substituted the derogatory “bitch”. It is the strongest claim that the play makes, for an idea that you may not already agree with, and Gavin's delivery allows us to accept it, provisionally, at least.
There is one white character in this play, a young white woman with whom Dontrell becomes smitten, a lifeguard who saves his life at the beach and teaches him to swim. Her presence at the family gathering in which Dontrell throws a stone at his mother's dignity is unfortunate for all. She surely doesn't wish to be there, though she sits and prays with the mother in the aftermath.
Why is she white, we wonder? It is by her that Dontrell is saved, and through her, he learns to swim, and thereby succeed in his quest, where his grandfather had failed.
The white woman as black man's savior is something of an artistic trope, well-worn enough to have spawned its own commentary and been probed for the problematic. I will merely gesture in the direction of that discourse, note that this modern play participates in it intentionally, and allow you to do your own research.
I gather that, in a prior version of this play, Dontrell, swimming to his doom in the ocean, leaves behind the lifeguard pregnant, reenacting his ancestor’s pattern: leaping to his death, yet surviving into the next generation.
For the soon-to-be mother to be a white woman would invite many more rounds of discourse. In the version we see, Dontrell perishes without heir, leaving only indirect lines to the future.
Does this mean that some cycle is broken? That this particular memory will no longer live on? None will be left to wake in a start from a haunting dream. Should we grieve that this memory is lost, or be glad? Yes, the playwright may have rewritten the script - but both possible narratives platonically exist. Do we prefer a world in which the generation-skipping dream continues, to one in which it goes blessedly extinct?
Dontrell himself moves backwards through time in this play. He begins playing an act, a thirty-first century space-time traveler, reporting in his “Captain's Log” of his explorations of the strange past. He is consumed by the need to document, for himself or for posterity, his thoughts and experiences, often addressing himself to “the Future”. He pulls out the voice recorder at awkward moments, so as to record himself speaking a new truth to a loved one, or reflecting upon a new experience. Who will listen to these messages? Surely not his children, for he will have none. Perhaps his family, though the messages are so voluminous, and mostly irrelevant, that I can't imagine one of them doing so. He is like Jim Ridge in The Chairs, composing his message for a future that will never hear it. Dontrell is then consumed by a dream from the past, one that so pulls him away from his eloquent missives to the Future that he abandons one quest for the other.
Dontrell clearly has a passion, one that he speaks into existence for the future at all hours. But his sudden obsession with the past soon leads him to his death. Mightn't it have been better had he never had that haunting dream? What life might Dontrell have lived had he never been bitten by the past, and instead lived as his idiosyncratic self to the fullest, made some name for himself, shared these self-journalistic thoughts with the world? Would it have mattered? Would it matter if it mattered? This play invites us to ponder: is the healing of ancestral trauma, with death, preferable to speaking to the future, with life?
It is somewhat ambiguous as to whether Dontrell does, in fact, die at the end. He sinks to the bottom of the depths and expires, but - in one of the most incredible pieces I've ever seen at American Players Theatre - is brought back to gasping life through the work of his ancestors. Is this metaphorical? Is it literal? Does Dontrell return home to his family? We do not know, for the scene quickly cuts to black, and is drowned in thunderous applause.
A couple of other things I want to note before wrapping up this review. There's incredible action and choreography throughout, rhythmic voices and stomps and claps and, as mentioned earlier, a final song with a resonant drum. It's exhilarating. I’d like to commend Jacqueline Springfield’s voice and text coaching for making these moments work so very well.
However, the putatively Best Seat in the House in which I sat - along the floor, in the far corner - was, unfortunately, a somewhat blind zone during these captivating movements, as my view was occasionally obstructed by one character or another.
Good thing I am going to see Dontrell, Who Kissed the Sea again. Next time I’ll sit a little higher up.
Four performances to note, two by two:
Derrick Moore: He’s on a roll, ladies and gentlemen. By turns giddy and wise, fearful and determined, Derrick plays the goofy kid in a way that elicits sympathy, encouragement, and worry from the audience. I can’t wait to see what he does next - bring him back, APT! (Was that too shameless?)
Jamie Herb: The lifeguard, in love with a doomed man. She becomes wrapped up in Dontrell’s passion and gleefully goes along for the ride, not knowing what she’s getting herself into. Jamie plays both halves of this character well: the weary young woman who hopes to save a life, and the fish-out-of-water, shocked in a shocking family moment, shaken by the time of prayer with Dontrell’s mother.
Rasell Holt: Rasell has rapped in the barn before, and so I had to ask if the rap scene was added for him for this production, or was a part of the script - turns out it was the latter. Good thing Rasell’s got the talent! He plays the family friend well, the innermost outsider, with a compelling mixture of braggadocio and anxiety.
Jazzma Pryor: Jazzma plays Shea, Dontrell’s supportive cousin, who procures for him the gear he needs for the ocean, with a tender mixture of love and anticipated regret. She is a docent at the aquarium, and her face glows as she demonstrates her joy in sharing with children and visitors the awe-inspiring beauty of the creatures of the sea.
You’ve simply got to go see Dontrell, Who Kissed the Sea. But please wait to buy your tickets so I can go see it again.
Afloat,
Twin Crix
