Theatre in Review: The Revolving Cycles Truly and Steadily Roll'd (The Duke on 42nd Street)

	Lynda Gravatt. Photo: (c) Daniel J Vasquez Productions

It is always striking to see how a play's impact can be affected by its timing. In his new production at The Playwrights Realm, Jonathan Payne demonstrates a highly theatrical imagination and a willingness to tackle some of our most troubling social issues, including the social and economic misery in which too many black Americans still find themselves and the perilous state of young black men who, typed as criminals, are as likely as not to die from a policeman's bullet. Where others see matters in stark black-and-white, Payne sees complexity. And some of his dialogue sears. The next time, or the time after that, he may very well deliver a work that delivers a knockout punch. This time out, however, he is cast in the role of Johnny-come-lately; The Revolving Cycles Truly and Steadily Roll'd merely repeats points made more strongly in a several other recent dramas.

The Revolving Cycles focuses on Karma, a seventeen-year-old homeless girl on a mission to find her foster brother, Terrell. The characters inhabit The Oblong, an inner-city neighborhood that could be in Chicago, Boston, New York, or anywhere that opportunity is nonexistent and resources are desperately scarce. Posters advertising Terrell's disappearance have been put up all over the neighborhood and are quickly removed. Trying to find out why, Karma -- a plucky, scrappy sort with a third-grade education -- encounters a parade of characters, including Madam Rose Profit, a funeral home director who laments the local conditions even as she seeks to make a bundle off them; Old Teacher, a white do-gooder whose tirades smack of self-pity; Dante, a twelve-year-old who illustrates his theological speculations with his own drawings and an overhead projector; Foster Mom, from whose home Terrell disappeared; and a young man with the ominous name of Death.

The idea of Karma making a kind of pilgrim's progress through this fallen urban environment is an interesting one, but her search lacks any urgency and the episodes don't build on each other. Instead, they seem to wander in a variety of directions, especially in the scenes featuring Profit -- a bloviating, deceitful figure, forever coming up with ideas like a "school for the derelict" -- which dangle uncertainly between drama and satire. Each time Karma arrives at a new location and encounter, the play seems to start all over again. Furthermore, there is little evidence of any bond between Karma and Terrell: Karma hasn't seen him in some time -- he has moved on to other families -- and, most recently, she robbed the place where he was staying, an act she defends as revenge for being ignored by him. (As Foster Mom cannily notes, "Ain't even seen your face and suddenly you some important n---a in his life. What have you done for Terrell?") Perhaps most damagingly, Terrell, whom we never see, doesn't ever come into focus, a fact that makes Karma's search seem strangely unreal.

Occasionally, Payne lands a jab that truly stings. Dante, already damaged at a young age, insists to the skeptical Karma that "God is real. He just ran away." Terrell's foster mom recalls with fury being told by a friend to stop worrying about the absent Terrell, because she "could get another." "Like he a toy I left at a place or something," she adds, scornfully. Gatto, a kind of Fagin figure who maintains a stable of panhandling children, tells the audience, "Empathy is our way. No. I take that back. We don't want your empathy. It's rare, anyway. It's your sympathy we want. Your pity. You give so much easier that way. You pay, and it keeps us where we are."

But the lack of drama proves debilitating, and the director, Awoye Timpo, is unable to save the action from a general listlessness. This is even true of the many instances in which the action breaks the fourth wall. Karma passes her hat, asking the audience for money. (At the performance I attended, she got a quarter from the man sitting in front of me.) A stage manager enters and hands a brick to Karma, cueing a catfight between her and Terrell's ex-girlfriend. Audience members are all but commanded to console a grieving character with the words "sorry for your loss." A standoff between Karma and a bellicose white cop lacks the crackle of similar depictions in Antoinette Nwandu's Pass Over or the stronger portions of Geraldine Inoa's Scraps. The scene is interrupted when Kenneth Tigar, who plays the cop, is made to step out of character to complain about the playwright's dialogue and muse about his acting process. At moments when The Revolving Cycles should provoke, it sometimes turns dismayingly coy.

Throughout, one is haunted by the feeling that these themes have been better handled elsewhere, as, for example, in James Ijames' surreal, troubling, Kill Move Paradise and Dael Orlandersmith's documentary piece Until the Flood. The police encounter in The Revolving Cycles pales before its equivalent in Seth Panitch's Separate and Equal, which, admittedly, is set in the 1950s American South; then again, how much have things changed since then? You could ask Michael Brown, if he were still alive.

In any case, the cast works hard and honorably at inhabiting the denizens of this sometimes fuzzy, ill-defined dramatic universe. If, as Karma, Kara Young doesn't quite dominate the action, you can probably blame the surprisingly flat character she has been given to play. Lynda Gravatt captures the blazing cynicism of Madame Profit, who prefers that her name be pronounced "pro-fee," lest we understand too well her venality. The actress has a real way with such weary pronouncements as "Black flock don't kill themselves, dear. If that were true, none of us would be here. There would be no such thing as an African-American." Keith Randolph Smith is his usual professional self as a barber who challenges Madame Profit and who, as Gatto, presides over his young brood with some genuine tenderness.

Puzzlingly, Kimie Nishikawa's set appears to be facing backwards; we spend the evening staring at the backsides of flats. The single exception is an all-white interior that serves as a surface for Lisa Renkel's projections. Renkel also delivers to the proscenium such cryptic scene titles as "The coal black rooster laments the hot commodity of youth." Andrea Hood's costumes include some memorably elaborate outfits for Madame Profit, who is dressed for every occasion, as long as it involves mourning. Stacey Derosier's lighting and Luqman Brown's sound design (including a variety of classical music selections) fall solidly into the acceptable range.

In a way, The Revolving Cycles is pitted against itself: In depicting characters who have absorbed a range of atrocious developments into their daily lives -- to the extent they barely notice them -- Payne more or less forecloses on the possibility of gripping drama. Even the finale, which culminates in a killing that should leave one shocked and shaken, doesn't really pay off. The play ends in an extended tableau meant to attack our collective conscience. At the performance I attended, it merely left the audience unsure if the play was over. -- David Barbour