‘brownsville song’ by Philadelphia Theatre Company (1st review)

In a household stuck amid a gang-infested Brooklyn neighborhood, Lena struggles to steer her precocious teenage grandson Tray and his nine-year-old half-sister Devine through the shoals of adolescence and childhood with the few meager tools at her disposal — mostly fear, anger, and the back of her hand. Tray harbors vague dreams of making something of himself, but Lena, having already lost a son to street violence, is preoccupied solely with Tray’s survival. In such a household, bereft of positive male role models or happy memories, any catalyst for youthful dreams must come from the outside world, but these inhabitants venture outside at the risk of their lives.

Unlikely catalyst

Indeed, as conceived in the Philadelphia Theatre Company’s current production, the central character of brownsville song is not so much the hardened Lena or the overwhelmed Tray but their Brownsville neighborhood, which in Scott Bradley’s brilliant set design surrounds and invades Lena’s home, leaving her humble kitchen constantly exposed to the elevated tracks, the mean concrete streets, and the check-cashing joints just a few feet away. In this supposed refuge, there's no place to hide from life’s inevitable obstacles, and there are too many opportunities for children to fall through the cracks. Tray clearly needs to get out of this place, but to where?

The catalyst for the action is Merrell, a part-time tutor who, it develops, carries serious baggage of her own: She’s a recovering alcoholic and drug addict who can’t find work because, as she explains, “Addiction is really its own full-time job.” The rootless Merrell actually envies Tray for his steady job (at Starbucks!) and his family, such as it is, from which she is barred by Lena because, we learn, Merrell is the mother of Tray’s little sister Divine — and a negligent mother at that. But Merrell’s attraction to Lena and Tray causes them to begin to see their own seemingly dead-end lives in a new light.

One big ‘if’

Philadelphia Theatre Company’s first-rate 90-minute production benefits from strong performances by Catrina Ganey and Curtiss Cook Jr. as Lena and Tray, respectively; Merrell, as portrayed by Sung Yun Cho, is too levelheaded to make a credible ex-junkie and alcoholic.

In Kimber Lee’s conception, these are characters given to too much speechifying and not enough listening, but maybe that’s the point: When you live on the edge, gentle interpersonal exchanges become a luxury. On the other hand, this grim but valuable drama suggests, life in a perpetual war zone can indeed build character: If you survive the ghetto — a big "if," Lee implies — you can probably handle anything.

Brownsville song arrives at a fortuitous moment. In American cities from New York to Baltimore to Cleveland to Ferguson, Missouri, crowds of angry black protesters have taken to the streets to proclaim, “Black lives matter.” To many white Americans, that’s an empty slogan. Not so empty, I suspect, to anyone who spends an evening with brownsville song.

For Naomi Orwin's review, click here.

For Rhonda Davis’s review, click here.