Theatre in Review: Buzzer (The Public Theater)

	Tessa Ferrer, Grantham Coleman. Photo: Joan Marcus

A professional couple moves into a changing neighborhood, exposing a minefield of prejudices and resentments in Tracey Scott Wilson's tense, suspenseful new play. This is gentrification with a twist: Jackson, a successful, Ivy-educated lawyer, who is black, decides to move back to the neighborhood where he grew up. In his youth in the '90s, the area was a war zone of gangs and crack dens. Even now, it's still a pretty rough place, but the handwriting is on the wall: "The wave is sweeping through here and before they build another coffee shop, before they build another gym, before the wave swallows up another person here, I want in," he says. "I know this neighborhood. I know what it's worth and I know what it can be."

So enthusiastic is Jackson that he buys a spacious, renovated apartment without telling his girlfriend, Suzy, who is white. Instead, he sweeps aside her many objections -- it's too far from her schoolteacher job, she can't afford to help with the mortgage -- and convinces her to move in with him. There's just one catch: Their old college friend, Don, a white drug addict, needs to stay with them temporarily. Don is a world-class screw-up and is on the verge of becoming homeless; he has nowhere else to go. (Early on, he says, "What I really need is a job, a woman, and a place to stay," and, really, the chances of getting the first two seem exceedingly remote.) It would be putting it mildly to say that Suzy doesn't care for the idea -- "I remember when he called me a drunk at rehab," she says acidly, by way of pointing out that Don is a real no-hoper -- but she gives in because Jackson insists.

It's immediately clear that this arrangement is a recipe for trouble, but exactly how and when the explosion will come is kept tantalizingly mysterious, thanks to Wilson's cagey way of playing with audience expectations. The balance shifts when Suzy and Don start to bond in a way that excludes Jackson, whose genial manner starts to ice over; soon, not-so-tiny fault lines begin to appear. When Don fondly recalls the summer he spent in this neighborhood with Jackson and his mother, Jackson coolly reminds Don that he was too strung out to remember anything. Don insists that it was the best time in his life. Jackson, tired of hearing his ghetto youth romanticized, says, "It was fantastical, incredible magical mystery Negro tour and you loved it. Right?"

By this point, Wilson has unfurled this trio's complicated backstory: Jackson and Don met at Exeter, when the former was a star scholarship student and the latter was already majoring in self-destruction. Later, Don's wealthy father threw him out of the house, but even now he dotes on Jackson as a kind of second good son. Don's father also bailed out Jackson and his mother financially. ("He used to call you and your mom the 'good blacks'," says Don, seething. "Except he didn't say black.") The more we learn, the more the Jackson-Don friendship looks less like a matter of affection and more like carefully calibrated matrix of debts and grievances.

Add in the fact that Don is visibly uncomfortable over any sign of affection between Suzy and Jackson, and that Suzy is deeply troubled at having to run the gauntlet of hostile attention from local men on the way home each night, a fact that she confides to Don, not Jackson. Then something happens between Don and Suzy that both are frantic to cover up, their lies leading to escalating tensions and a fraught, three-way confrontation that ensures nothing will ever be the same for any of them.

Wilson masterfully constructs the play's central triangle, each relationship poisoned by a different cocktail of racial, class, and sexual prejudices. Don is secretly furious at the attention his father has showered on Jackson's family. Jackson, who isn't getting ahead at work, grows sick of Don's manipulations and jealous of Don's easy way with Suzy. Suzy finds that her life is being subsumed into Jackson's existence, and she doesn't like it one bit. As in Ayad Akhtar's Disgraced, a play that bears a faint resemblance to Buzzer, a successful man of color discovers that his happiness is erected on a foundation of sand, and even those closest to him have agendas of their own.

Anne Kauffman's taut direction is full of revealing moments, including the sight of Don walking to his bedroom like a child, trailing all of his worldly possessions in two laundry bags; Suzy, about to step outside, gazing worriedly out the window at the street scene below and quietly changing her mind; or the ever-cool Jackson suddenly, furiously hurling his cell phone across the room. All three leads deliver minutely observed performances designed to keep us on tenterhooks. Grantham Coleman's Jackson is all charm at first, but even in the opening scenes there's something a little overbearing about him, and he hardens visibly as he plans to confront the men who torment Suzy. Tessa Ferrer is feisty and funny as Suzy, especially in her amusing opening monologue, explaining how she was suspended from the schoolroom for using the word "motherfracking" in front of her grade schoolers, but she is also quietly stunning in her account of the insults she must endure daily simply for walking down the block. (This speech is framed as a litany that begins with "Hey, sexy" and ends with a four-letter-word beginning with the letter C; it is one of the most hair-raising accounts of harassment I have ever come across.) Michael Stahl-David captures Don's innate immaturity -- when Suzypoints out that he has been to rehab no fewer than eight times, he corrects her, adding ,"One time I didn't go, even though I said I did." -- and his terror at being found out by Jackson. He gives a sterling rendition of the speech in which Don bluntly informs Suzy's students that they should stay off drugs because, unlike him, they don't have a rich father to bail them out.

Recently, Laura Jellinek has become one of the most interesting scenic designers around, an impression that Buzzer confirms with her abstract version of Jackson and Suzy's apartment, consisting of a series of elegantly molded, but sawed-off, walls at stage right and a simple arrangement of furniture at stage center. Later, the black upstage wall opens to reveal the building's lobby for a couple of crucial encounters. The space is lit with infinite creativity by Matt Frey, who mixes a variety of hues and color temperatures to create any number of moods and time-of-day looks. Clint Ramos' costumes aptly contrast Jackson's tailored suits with Don's ragged wear. The unusually subtle sound design, by Bray Poor, creates a barely perceptible undertone of street sounds, quietly reminding us of the environment outside that frightens Suzy so much. Also, the script makes one reference to Jackson's troubles at work, but the constant ding signaling the arrival of yet another email message on his smartphone hints at much deeper problems.

Buzzer ends with order restored, more or less, and with at least one major secret preserved, at least nominally, but, as the final tableau shows, it is a cheerless resolution. "Only truth in this house;" this is the mantra the characters speak throughout the play. As it turns out, neither the awful truth nor the best-intentioned lie can save these characters from themselves. -- David Barbour