THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By Stephen Adly Guirgis, directed by Michael Longhurst
Hampstead Theatre, Eton Avenue, Swiss Cottage, London NW3 3EU until June 15, 2024
Amazingly it has taken 10 years for this Pulitzer Prize winner and Tony nominee to get here. This is odd considering Guirgis' earlier dark comedies such as The Last Days of Judas Iscariot and The Motherf***er With The Hat were very well received here, and the Donmar Warehouse's 2002 production of Jesus Hopped the A Train was a milestone in establishing his career.
The Hampstead, which goes from strength to strength, is to be commended for staging this great new drama, which has echoes of Miller in how it grapples with big moral questions of the day in intensely human stories about figures who are or have been done over by the system. There are very few living playwrights who can match Guirgis' gift for dialogue, (it's street but heightened) or his ability to hone unforgettable, empathetic, characters and to do it all with a foul-mouthed sass, his trademark.
The great Danny Sapani, fresh from his King Lear, plays Walter 'Pops' Washington a roaring, quarrelsome, bear of a man who is a beloved patriarch to those around him. He's a retired New York cop, fueled now by alcohol and mourning his wife's death. He's spent eight years fighting for compensation from NYPD after he was shot and made impotent by a younger white officer who mistook him for a criminal. But was it that simple? He's also fighting a rearguard action to hold on to his rent-controlled apartment on Riverside Drive but since his wife passed it has become a nest for son Junior's dodgy associates. There's Lulu (Tiffany Gray) a dim but endearing maybe sex-worker and Junior's ex con friend, Oswaldo. Sebastian Orozco (so great in Clyde's) again brings a playful vulnerability to this very broken character. Both dote on 'Pops' and find in him the father figure they never had. Martins Imhangbe is really affecting too as the real son, trying to go straight. But you can't take your eyes off Sapani.
Where Guirgis is good is in how all his characters "have their reasons". Where he stumbles on occasion is in rather sudden plot twists that can be too tricksy. One recurring theme is faith, and the persistence of it despite life's disappointments (which again is very Miller). This can be either faith in your offspring, the satisfactions of a career well served, or the conventional comforts of religion. A proselytizing Brazilian 'Church Lady' visits Walter in an encounter which ends up in a sexual tryst – Ayesha Antoine has great fun with this scene-stealer of a part – but we later realize she too was on the make. Nothing's easy here.
Judith Roddy and Daniel Lapaine really impress too, as respectively Walter's former detective partner (so close she wants him to walk her down the aisle) and her husband, a fellow officer, Lieutenant Caro, who knows Walter all too well. They are trying to get him to accept a deal and stop causing such a headache for their bosses downtown, and the tensions that this unleashes are very personal but also illustrate the broader cross currents of race and wealth and power in the Big Apple, which Guirgis has always explored so deftly. Their unflagging devotion to Walter, even when he turns on them, does stretch credibility, however.
Director Michael Longhurst elicits great performances from this cast and gives it a momentum, despite the odd longeur. He is somewhat let down by Max Jones' set though, which manages to be too spare and too cluttered at the same time. A play about the memories embodied in a home, even spelled out in the text, cries out for a more naturalistic approach.
