'Rasheeda Speaking' at the New Group

Writing about race is a risky business. It takes guts and conviction — and playwright Joel Drake Johnson has both, judging from his incendiary new play. He’s going where angels fear to tread.

The setting couldn’t be more innocuous: a doctor’s office in a Chicago hospital. Dr. Williams, a handsome young surgeon, is briefing Ileen, a member of his office staff. The atmosphere is friendly and professional, but it turns out to be more than an ordinary meeting. First, Dr. Williams praises Ileen for her eight years of loyal service — in fact he’s promoting her to office manager. Then the other shoe drops. He asks her to build a case against her coworker, Jaclyn, who has been there for six months and whose attitude has displeased him. “It’s hard to get rid of people today,” says the doctor, and you know that this play is heading for deep trouble. After all, both Dr. Williams and Ileen are white — and Jaclyn, we discover, is black.

Passive and eager to please, Ileen makes some attempt to defend Jaclyn but finally agrees keep a notebook documenting incidents that might provide cause for the doctor to have her dismissed. The Rubicon has been crossed, and Ileen is now an informant.

Tragic breakdown

The play’s ultimate focus is on the tragic breakdown between Ileen and Jaclyn, two amicable coworkers caught in a dynamic that spins out of control, driving each to destructive behavior in order to survive. “Honesty is not always the best policy,” says Dr. Williams, who is manipulating the situation. The conflict crescendos to an almost unbearable pitch, with each person’s distrust and paranoia coming to the surface. “Too bad he doesn’t like black people,” says Jaclyn of the doctor. “I thought we were friends,” cries Ileen. “We were friendly, that’s all,” replies Jaclyn. “You and I could never be friends,” she adds later, as the gulf between them widens beyond bridging.

As the determined Jaclyn, fighting for survival, Tonya Pinkins is a commanding stage presence who delivers a powerful performance. As Ileen, who is losing her grip on sanity, Dianne Wiest unravels before our very eyes into a state of dysfunction and near madness. Darren Goldstein as the doctor and Patricia Conolly as Mrs. Saunders, a patient, deliver fine, sharply etched performances.

Actress Cynthia Nixon (of Sex and the City fame) makes her directorial debut with impressive skill and control. The threat of violence hangs on the air from the moment the play begins, and Nixon keeps her foot on the pedal as the conflict escalates to a shocking, unbearably painful final scene.

In an interview, the playwright explained that the source of this play came from a real-life incident. After he complained to a hospital about hostile treatment from a black receptionist, she was fired. He says that his ensuing guilt motivated him to write the play.

Unanswered questions

“Why can't black people and white people get along?” the playwright asks more than once through his character Jaclyn, in this hard-hitting play about racism where everyone lies and everyone is guilty. Instead of answering, Ileen repeats the warning: “You need to be careful. Very, very careful.”

Ileen’s admonition reminds me of the final words in another powerful play about race, Athol Fugard’s 'Master Harold'...and the Boys (1982). “You can’t fly a kite on a rainy day,” 17-year-old Hally says to the black family servant, Sam, who served as the white boy’s surrogate father all his life. Kite-flying, their favorite shared activity in happy days, is the play’s metaphor for brotherhood and harmony between the races. But, as with Ileen and Jaclyn, the gulf between Hally and Sam widens, almost beyond hope of reconciliation.

Fugard wrote Master Harold under apartheid, whereas Johnson is writing his new play in a more hopeful time, under our country’s first African-American president. But plays like Rasheeda Speaking — as well as recent events in Ferguson and elsewhere — remind us that we’re still having our share of rainy days, and that, in Ileen’s words, we still need to be “very, very careful.”