THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By June Carryl
Seven Dials Playhouse, 1A Tower St, London WC2H 9NP, until March 30, 2024
What does one call a story that so unnervingly and capably gives us a terrifying insight into the kind of hateful ideology that leads to racially motivated violence and deep-seated, visceral hatred of that which is different? I am put in mind of Eudora Welty's Where is That Voice Coming From?, a story published in 1963 that presents the entire narrative from the point of view of civil rights leader Medgar Evers' white supremacist assassin, Byron De La Beckwith. When Welty or Flannery O'Connor or Joyce Carol Oates do it we call it Southern Gothic. Is a story set in California then called Western Gothic?
Whatever we call June Carryl's new play currently on at the Seven Dials Playhouse in the West End, BLUE is unequivocally riveting and devastatingly disarming in the pathos it stirs and the questions it forces us to ask of ourselves. It is a taut, intensely self-contained two-hander that is masterfully executed.
It's also yet another argument why truly excellent theater is much better off shedding the now meaninglessly trite modifier 'immersive.' In the intimate space of this very small West End venue it immerses the entirety of the audience, thanks to some very close attention to detail in Carla Goodman's cleverly realized slate gray interrogation room of an LA police station, right down to the opaque looking mirror and Public Service Announcement style Covid posters, placing us firmly back in the year of our Lord 2021, a year that, in the wake of George Floyd's death at the hands of the Minneapolis police and the subsequent riots in the capital arguably at the behest of the outgoing president Trump, is of crucial significance to the issues at which Carryl is aiming with a theatrical battering ram.
Carryl, who is both writer and star of this Edinburgh Fringe award-winning exploration of race and identity, plays Parker, a recently promoted LAPD detective tasked with investigating the shooting of a black man in suspicious circumstances. The individual responsible is a colleague who happens to also be a longtime family friend, a premise that rings as all too heartbreakingly familiar and sounds all too much like headlines we have almost come to expect from our country so far across the water.
Carryl and her co-star, John Colella, playing the aforementioned colleague, Sully, create a riveting, stichomythic atmosphere in the confined space of the interrogation room, with all the rapidly boiling tension of a psychological thriller. Colella brilliantly captures with nuance the defensive, persecuted siege complex of the kind we have heard in podcasts and testimonials in the wake of January 6th. Carryl is controlled and subtle in her conflicted role as friend, colleague and investigator, until she needs to unleash the explosive torrent of raw and visceral emotions that we can feel in the building political clouds over the riven cloth of American society.
Carryl's performance is powerful and rips into one's soul. She presents us with the argument that we have been waiting to have with our more conservative friends and relatives and at the same time the most eloquent narrative I have seen bringing meaning to the lives of the many Americans (and those in the UK and globally) of color that have lost their lives or suffered harrowing trauma at the hands of an iniquitous system of policing and justice.
The most important play that has arrived here in years and one that forces you to question where we are as a society right now, and how we can get somewhere better.
Author and actor June Carryl has written an exclusive article for The American about what led her to write BLUE. Read it here.
