Regina Taylor's Drowning Crow is a mess based on Chekhov's The Seagull. Set on South Carolina's Gullah Islands, with a black cast, it's a good idea gone blooey. Two things are necessary in theater: communicate and entertain. Poor direction by Marion McClinton undercuts the simple communication of the content -- jumping around while talking breaks our empathy with the characters, especially in the case of the very handsome Anthony Mackie playing a troubled writer, whose histrionic antics distance us from the story. Most of the acting in this production is performance, declaiming, a gesture for every word, rather than human beings speaking. Mixed in with the play are some very engaging musical numbers and visualizations, like the illusion of swimmers in the sea, that entertain and draw us in. But they are short and seem to be from another play, and we are soon back in the morass of dull (even when loud) rhetoric.
Peter Francis James, as the Trigorin character, plays it real, and the show picks up, but the problem then is that Aunjanue Ellis' overacting as Hannah (Nina) glares in her scene with him. Even the usually powerful Alfre Woodard seems insincere, without real needs or deep feelings, only surface expulsions of words. Basically, throughout the play, we are spectators to the problems of these people rather than participants, which can be boring. The director should be drummed out of the Guild; the playwright should be encouraged to keep trying.
