Mauckingbird's "Tru' and "The Threshing Floor'

I freely admit that I'm no fan of one-person plays. Of the genre's half-dozen or so examples in Philadelphia each year, I last enjoyed Robert LePage's The Andersen Project, which played at the Merriam Theatre almost a year ago. LePage's piece felt fresh, used inventive stage techniques (including a visually astounding incorporation of multimedia) and, most important, employed a central narrative dominated by episodes of conflict. It helped that Yves Jacques played multiple characters, all engaged on one side of this struggle or another.

There I could at least pretend I was watching a full-fledged drama. The two shows currently in repertory at Mauckingbird — Jay Presson Allen's Tru and James Ijames's The Threshing Floor—afforded me no such pretense.

Both plays merely offer biographical explorations of two writers—Truman Capote and James Baldwin—who trod similar paths. Both suffered the early trauma of parental abandonment (either physical or psychological). Ijames's script has Baldwin remark, "It's a horrible thing to grow up with a father that doesn't like you," while Capote recalls a mother who ran off with another man. Each writer experienced bigotry of one sort firsthand at an early age— Baldwin from a police officer giving free ice cream to all children but Negroes, and Capote from a mocking "fortune teller" (an episode that forms the culmination of the main narrative and which I won't spoil).

Each discovered his talent for words at an early age, and each seems to have known everyone worth knowing in his respective circle. Capote lived next door to Johnny Carson (at 870 United Nations Way) and befriended "everybody from Sirhan Sirhan and Bobby Kennedy to Lee Harvey Oswald and JFK." In Ijames's Baldwin narrative, whenever the central narrator drops a name, Ijames shifts into that character, whether Josephine Baker, Malcolm X, Richard Wright or Eldridge Cleaver. As Capote puts it for both of them, "I have lived an astonishing life, I know."

Capote as Jay Gatsby

Despite their wide circles of famous friends, both writers lived as exiles from their own communities. Baldwin departed for France when he was 24, and Capote pulled a Jay Gatsby, infiltrating a high-society world of Vanderbilts and Whitneys. Among many other similarities that make for an apt pairing by the gay-oriented Mauckingbird troupe, both men discovered their homosexuality early and tumbled headfirst into disastrous relationships that would leave each, at the end of the evening and the end of their lives, still longing for a true love and place to call home.

But neither play offers any central conflict with which to construct a drama. Tru at least attempts this feat, to some extent. After Esquire magazine published a few chapters of Capote's tell-all, Answered Prayers, his wealthy friends either feuded with him or dropped him entirely. Later, we learn that he can't complete the book because his lover stole six binders of notes. In both cases, we hear all this one-sided fighting through telephone calls or direct address narration.

A student's contrived question

Similarly, Ijames's Threshing Floor rambles its way through a poorly articulated dramatic contrivance: A young Ph. D. student, after reading a passage of Baldwin's, exclaims, "He makes me feel something" and head for southern France to answer the question: "Does Baldwin still matter?" I couldn't help thinking: "Really? You'll use a teenager's vocabulary to explore an eloquent writer's significance?"

To be sure, Ijames picked a difficult, ambiguous question to answer. For whom does Baldwin matter, and for what? For his literary output? For his role in the civil rights movement? For his depiction of homosexuality at a time when society forbade it? For his stature as an author, or as an African-American author?

Unfortunately, Ijames's 90-minute work barely touches upon each of these questions, and not very helpfully. To answer such questions, of course, we'd have to see the conflicts Baldwin and Capote faced, not just hear about them. Any good story, Capote tells us, must have "a little murder in it." That's what's lacking here.