"In a Daughter's Eyes,' by InterAct (2nd review)

Chekhov's First Rule: If you bring a gun onstage, you must use it.

More on that later.

The gun that lies behind A. Zell Williams's play, In a Daughter's Eyes, now in its world premiere production at the InterAct Theatre, is not the one that Williams introduces. It's the gun that killed the Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner on the night of December 9, 1981, and which was fired, according to the State of Pennsylvania, by Mumia Abu-Jamal, and, according to others, by Kenneth Freeman, or possibly someone else.

In the nearly 30 years since that night the Mumia case has become what the Sacco and Vanzetti case was to the 1920s: a defining moment in the way a generation of Americans has perceived itself. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed seven years after their conviction, a lengthy hiatus by the standards of that time; but Mumia, now 57, remains on Death Row, his sentence still in litigation although his murder conviction is not.

Williams has transposed the story to Oakland, California, and given Mumia a pseudonym, Rashid Abu-Jalam. He has imagined a daughter for "Jalam" who plays the advocacy role more or less assumed for Mumia by Ramona Africa, and also a daughter for the Faulkner counterpart, Officer Tinney.

Rehema Salaam (Lynnette R. Freeman) is obsessed with freeing her father from Death Row and establishing his innocence, and when Kathryn Tinney (Krista Apple) offers to testify on behalf of a motion to compel the release of sealed evidence in the case, Rehema demands rewrite after rewrite of Kathryn's statement.

Combative vs. submissive

Rehema is profane, a chain-smoker in a T-shirt who rolls her sleeves combatively up to the shoulders; Kathryn comes to see her in her nurse's scrubs, a passive attire that suggests submissiveness and low self-esteem. Both women have been wounded by the loss of their fathers in childhood, and Kathryn seems partly attracted by Rehema's focus and determination.

Kathryn's real reasons for approaching the enemy camp are never made very clear, though, nor what she hopes for in return. Here is where the real play should begin, but Williams never gets far below the surface of his characters, and so stage business (a piggy bank with multiple significations) and melodramatic interruptions take the place of a relationship between the two women.

Kathryn appears at the beginning of Act I with a black eye, and in much worse condition in Act II. Her entire disposition suggests a battered woman reaching out for help, but Rehema is focused solely on obtaining a maximally useful statement from her, a strategy that we can guess won't bear fruit.

Climactic confrontation

In Act II the circumstances are reversed: Now Kathryn must seek help from Rehema. When Rehema responds with something less than generosity, particularly in view of intervening circumstances, a climactic confrontation ensues with the show's principal props— the piggy bank, and Rehema's concealed weapon— drawn into play. Does the gun fire?

Williams' intention seems to be to show the collateral personal damage of political tragedy, but in reducing both Faulkner/Tinney and Mumia/Rashid to generic figures he limits his perspective to the interaction of his two characters. The play thus rides with them, and each turns out to be a victim who prizes her victimhood too much to embrace the humanity in her counterpart.

In the play's most affecting moment, Kathryn describes the physical sensation of being enfolded in her father's arms as a child. It's not clear at all, however, that she and Rehema have reached the kind of intimacy that could make this revelation appropriate rather than awkward, and Rehema offers nothing in response— the proffer of friendship or at least of shared loss (if that's what it is) falls on stony ground, and the women remain as far apart as ever. In the end, they can only replicate the conflict, and ultimately the violence, in which their fathers were enmeshed.

What, then, is the takeaway here? Are the sins of the fathers being visited on the daughters? Is race an unbridgeable divide in American life?

One factual question

But such questions presuppose an interpretation of the events of December 9, 1981 that essentially comports with the police and prosecution version: that Faulkner and Mumia fired upon each other, in a scene the play re-enacts by proxy. Mumia himself, however, has given an entirely different version, to wit: "I did not shoot Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. I had nothing to do with the killing of Officer Faulkner. I am innocent." [Affidavit of Mumia Abu-Jamal, May 3, 2001.]

The political tragedy of the Mumia Abu-Jamal case— a tragedy of American jurisprudence— is not about what happened on Locust Street on a December night 30 years ago, but what happened after and is still happening. Mumia either did or did not shoot Daniel Faulkner, which is a matter of fact that, as such, has nothing to do with race or anything else but two men, one or both armed, shooting or not shooting at each other.

Williams can't answer that question, but he does use it in his play, and the issue is whether he uses it responsibly. Kathryn approaches Rehema in part because she professes to have doubts about the prosecution version of events between "Rashid" and "Tinney," but she drops them when she doesn't get the emotional validation she seeks. That's dramatically plausible, but how then are we to interpret the final scene between her and Rehema?

Theater as courtroom?

If, as I suggest, it's a symbolic reenactment of the confrontation between Tinney/Faulkner and Rashid/Mumia, then a factual determination is at least implied. For me, this is very tricky ground. Courtrooms may make good theater, but theaters seldom make a good court.

Both actresses, particularly Freeman, ran up on lines on opening night, but both were deeply engaged in their respective roles. Rebecca Wright's aggressive direction doesn't allow for much subtlety, and, although Kathryn's second act transformation was obviously accounted for, Rehema's abrupt change of personal style was far less convincing, as was the suddenly spiffed-up appearance of her office in Caitlin Lainoff's setting. I liked Maria Shaplin's lighting, but sound and special effects were a bit awkward. Bricks do make noise when thrown, don't they?

The real problem with In a Daughter's Eyes, though, lies in its verbal brickbats. Granted that even Oprah couldn't have brought these two girls together, they might at least have learned something from each other, and we from them. Their stalemated duel remains ours, but we come away none the wiser from it.♦


To read another review by Dan Rottenberg, click here.