A METAPHYSICAL DOUBLE FEATURE
"Epiphany" at Lincoln Center Theater and "Fat Ham" at The Public
(Above: Marylouise Burke as Morkan in Epiphany at Lincoln Center Theater. Photo by Jeremy Daniel.)
I recently experienced one of the best days of theatre-going I have had in a long time. It began at the matinee of Epiphany at Lincoln Center at the intimate Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater. (It alas ends it run this weekend on Sunday July 24th.). Written by Brian Watkins and directed by Tyne Rafaeli, it is a metaphysical seance disguised as a dinner party, a tragedy disguised as a comedy, eternity itself disguised as linear time (or was the other way around?). Indeed, during the upstate New York dinner party which is being thrown by an eerily endearing dollop-sized doyenne so brilliantly portrayed by Marylouise Burke, in order to acknowledge the religious holiday of its title which celebrates the very concept of manifestation, the creative process is described as “creating time … that the space between seconds and minutes actually like widens and deepens … as if eternity was inhabiting you.” It is one of the hints strewn throughout the play since even as we watch it we are told that the temporal aspect of the evening - the one measured by the clock not the corporeal one being tested spiritually - has stretched out before us without any signal to us that it just had since we assume we are watching the action in real time. Eternity has inhabited the manifested dinner guests - especially the ones who remain in the end to haunt us as we leave the theatre haunted by our own selves, our own lives, our own deaths we so often see selfishly before us in the deaths of others. The play is indeed an homage to James Joyce’s The Dead, the last story in Dubliners, in which the character Gabriel Conroy actually has an epiphany about life and death and human connection. Watkins isn’t intimidated by Joyce and the short story - and doesn’t bog down in reverence for his source material - so the dinner guests he manifests before us are an assortment of 21st Century archetypes handled with witty aplomb by the writer and brilliantly portrayed by the entire cast. The play skims over lots of surfaces before it deepens and puzzles but always pulsates with the life that the dead must miss.
Falling snow is one of the motifs of The Dead as it is in Epiphany, contributing to a stunning coup de théâtre image at the end of the production. This is the paragraph at the end as well of Joyce’s The Dead: “Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
Soul swooning and thinking of the descent of a couple of the characters last end in Epiphany, I headed downtown to see Fat Ham, the latest Pulitzer Prize winner for Drama. It then dawned on me that my imaginary friend when I was a child was named Epiphany. She was a little Black girl who had emerged from the television screen when I was watching a Tarzan episode on a lonely afternoon where I grew up out in the country in Mississippi. This is a bit of what I wrote about her in my first memoir, Mississippi Sissy: “From the moment she alighted fully formed out of the very light of the television screen, Epiphany was constantly by my side. I can’t say I was shocked by her presence, or even spooked by it, for I knew that I had created her. She was not real. I was bereft, as close to crazy as a kid can be when his parents’ lives are kicked out from under him, but I was not crazy enough to believe Epiphany was a flesh-and-blood little girl. I see now she was a way to witness the narrative of my life, which by the age of eight had become too difficult for me to comprehend any longer as a participant. Epiphany was the first character I would make up before I ever tried my hand at writing fiction or magazine profiles or fashioning a memoir into fable.” As I thought about my own Epiphany while thinking of the Epiphany I had just seen, I had this one: I had just witnessed a fable about manifestation so that someone could pay witness to the narrative of her life.
(Above: Marcel Spears as Juicy in Fat Ham at The Public.)
Just as the earlier play that day had been an homage to James Joyce’s The Dead, Fat Ham by James Ijames and directed by Saheem Ali is an homage to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Instead of a dinner party, the play centers around a Black family’s backyard barbecue - but the living and the dead are again invited. Or, as the Pulitzer committee wrote: “A funny, poignant play that deftly transposes Hamlet to a family barbecue in the American South to grapple with questions of identity, kinship, responsibility, and honesty.” They rather dishonestly left out its utter queerness - which is odd, since they awarded its Black queer take on Hamlet the prize.
I had one of the “special seating” lawn chairs that line the stage area on the floor of the theatre so I felt as if I were a guest at the barbecue - an unseen ghost right next to that seen one. To be that close to such remarkable actors who mine such truth in the heightened hearth of this home, this backyard full of back stories, was something I’ll never forget. I sat astonished by their brilliance as I laughed, gasped, sighed, teared up, and often just sat with my mouth agape and my heart newly opened. I expected to be exhausted by an expected tragic ending but was instead confronted with a raucous kind of hope and even joy.
Fat Ham is the meat that falls off the bones of Shakespeare’s version. It takes the revenge that limns Hamlet and reinvents it as well a murder itself as we watch the three main characters based on Hamlet and Ophelia and Laertes - Juicy and Opal and Larry -”kill off” their inauthentic selves and become what their families least expect: fuck-the-family authentic. And yet the play hilariously and hauntingly celebrates the family. To be or not to be indeed.
Marcel Spears is giving a deeply felt performance as Juicy, the Hamlet character. There is a steely softness to him and a knowing grace as he grapples with his conscience. I will never forget his rendition of Radiohead’s “Creep.” Yes, you read that correctly for Fat Ham is the kind of play that can insert such a number into its 95-minute running time with the same knowing grace employed by Spears himself to perform it.
The production runs until July 31st. If you can get a ticket, do not miss it.
Lucky Kevin!