Harlem Renaissance

The play is titled The Old Settler written by one John Henry Redwood, so you’re forgiven if you jump to the conclusion that it’s a tale of the frontier.

Actually, it is, but not the Western frontier. The setting’s Harlem, 1943—a cultural frontier, where black musicians and writers rubbed elbows with high-powered pastors, fashionably dressed gangsters and their girls, and a few forward-looking white folks who’d figured out that Duke Ellington was cool.

In fact, Redwood’s script (copyright 1998) namedrops like crazy, just to make sure everybody knows that we’re talking about the Harlem Renaissance. The play, however, is an entirely interior story—all scenes take place in the living room of an apartment, with a tidy cast of three women and one man … just big enough to produce a potent (if sudsy) love triangle using the autumn/spring template, spiced with alternating episodes of sibling rivalry between a pair of single, middle-aged sisters.

Playwright Redwood won’t get a lot of points for innovative renditions on established comic formulas—his plot progression is predictable, and his characters handle developments pretty much as you’d expect. But even if the story yields few surprises, Redwood has put together some very funny dialogue spiked with a few devastating put-downs, mostly in the language of the place and time.

And the enthusiastic, very capable cast has a field day throughout, which makes for a very enjoyable (and, I expect, popular) show. Christiana Quick-Cleveland is excellent as the private, 40-something spinster who (much to her own surprise) finds herself falling in love with a much younger man who’s just arrived from the rural South and is bowled over by the big city (winningly played by DeAngelo Mack). Tammye Denyse plays the man’s former girlfriend—having arrived in Harlem, she’s gotten into nightlife, and changed her name from Lou Bessie to the more sophisticated-sounding Charmaine. And Cynthia Gatlin enjoys several flamboyant scenes as the nosy, occasionally exploitative sister.

Director Linda Goodrich sets up the physical comedy adroitly, and the verbal punchlines seldom miss. The lighting was poorly executed on the night I saw the show (dimming at odd intervals), but otherwise the technical aspects look good.