In his claustrophobic a.m. Sunday, the fourth offering in the 26th annual Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theater of Louisville, playwright Jerome Hairston drops us into the home and lives of a troubled interracial couple and their two uneasy sons. Hairston himself was born to a black father and a Korean mother, and though he has said the play is not autobiographical, one would expect more dramatic revelations from the situation than he provides. Little here makes this family and its problems different from others without the racial mix. Is that perhaps his point?
The boys, teenage Jay (Jason Cornwell) and 11-year-old Denny (H. J. Adams) sense and see the strain between their white mother Helen (Barbara Gulan) and black father R. P. (Ray Anthony Thomas) but the strain doesn't stem from racial differences. Helen most certainly loves R. P., but he apparently is having an affair with a woman who makes taunting phone calls to the house and asks, "Is your father happy?" when one of the boys answers. Jay's courtship of white classmate Lorie (Tarah Flanagan) elicits ugly racial slurs at school, and Jay for the first time seems to be shocked into an awareness of difference -- a difference that parallels his mother and father's but which does not seem to loom large for them. Vulnerable young Denny, struggling with math and an unsympathetic teacher, considers taking a knife to school and comes close to stealing a pair of shoes at the mall. But such "acting out" is not uncommon in children from any family where parents are at odds and tensions are high. One wishes some spark could lift Hairston's characters and problems above the mundane level.
