By Linda Drummond Johnson, Guest Reviewer
Queens
Girl in the World is
an extraordinary one-woman play currently in its New York debut at Theater Row.
It stars Felicia Curry, an actor with many honors, awards, and accolades, and
it was written by the also multiple-award-winning playwright Caleen Sinnette
Jennings. It is part of a “Queens Girl” trilogy, which has been performed
across the country. Queens Girl in the World is the first to be
performed in New York City.
Queens
Girl is a semi-autobiographical tale about a Black
girl growing up in a middle income/working class Black enclave in Queens in the
60s. I also was a Black girl growing up in a middle-income/working class Black enclave
in Queens in the 60s. Apparently, so was the writer, Ms. Jennings, who is pitch
perfect in capturing the tone, dilemmas, personalities, sounds, conversation,
and backdrop of what it meant to be a young, naive Negro girl of (relative)
privilege coming of age during a politically and culturally turbulent time.
I was grinning from ear to ear under
my mask a full 30 minutes before I was aware of it. Felicia Curry as Jacqueline
Marie Butler (“Jackie”) wastes no time luring us into her orbit. With her
shining face and beaming smile, she is wide-eyed with promise, and she inhabits
the body of a self-conscious, flat-chested, “pre-mens” young lady. You will laugh every time Jackie screams as
she learns about how s-e-x actually works!)
We, the audience, are seated in
an intimate theater with the set of a simple stoop (“front steps” for you non-urban
dwellers) and a house’s brick front backed by a large silk screen on which is projected
everything from sunny skies to stars to historical figures. With Motown sounds
piped in and Daisy Long’s ingenious lighting design, we are taken back to the
early 1960s where Jacqueline Marie lives with her Caribbean doctor-father Charles
and proper genteel mother, Grace. They, along with neighborhood and City folk,
Black, Jewish, white, male, female, and of varying ages are all deftly portrayed
by Ms. Curry.
Sometimes, it is a subtle
change of inflection with shoulders and back hunched forward, an authentic
dialect, and a particular gesture that signals the change from one character to
another in a choreographed call and response. Other times, with a hip thrown one
way with her body leaning the other, Curry uses a voice like a screeching metal
swing to mimic the bobble-headed wise-aleck girl down the block. Ms. Curry is
able, even wearing a skirt and with her hair in two “Afro puffs,” to morph into
a tall, full-bodied teenage boy without becoming the caricature of one. Kudos
to director /choreographer Paige Hernandez, who clearly knows when enough is
enough but never too much as she keeps us in the story throughout these changes,
even during one shocking encounter.
While it has a timeless coming
of age theme, this story is set in a very specific place and time, where a girl
“assigned Negro at birth” is hemmed in by unique circumstances: her assigned identity, the nationally burgeoning
“Black” identity, and finding a personage of her own, all within unspoken class
warfare between “Strivers” (the first real Black professional class,
disproportionately represented in Queens by Caribbean immigrants) and their
lower income American neighbors.
If that
is not enough, Jackie is sent by her parents to an elite all-white private school
in Greenwich village where she must navigate a progressive Jewish establishment
and where she goes from being the smartest girl in her local school to needing
a tutor to keep up. “Caught between the Irwin School and Erickson Street” is
one of the ways she describes her quandary. (During one scene where I probably
laughed a little too loudly, Jacqueline “interprets” the items in her overnight
bag to a white friend during a sleepover. When she got to hair products, I lost
it.)
Dad, Dr. Butler,
is an activist and separatist, with a healthy distrust of white America. He is friends with Malcolm X and a fan of
natural, Black beauty. The regal Mrs. Grace Butler wants her beloved only child
to succeed and integrate into American society, and she grooms her to keep up
with the establishment that her father disdains. Mom Grace reminds Jackie that
she is not like those other (read: lower class, Southern born) Negro
girls. Grace Butler also acts as the “grammar police,” ensuring that her daughter
enunciates every i-n-g at the end of a word and never, ever, answers
a question with, “Huh?” That was spot on enough to give me
flashbacks!
Racism is a
concept too new to Jackie to have formed an opinion about, but when it hits, it
hits. She goes through puberty during a civil rights period that is moving from
nonviolent resistance to the beginnings of the Black liberation movement
following Malcolm’s death. Her political consciousness develops simultaneously with
her breasts going from training bras to “big girl” brassieres.
This often
upbeat and entertaining rendering can also wring a tear out of you as the
realities of a violent world slowly leave their stain on Jackie’s innocence (while
never dampening her resilience). You may also cry with laughter watching
Jackie/Ms. Curry do “the Pony,” "the Jerk," and other 60’s dances
with hilarious over-enthusiasm. And most everyone will identify with trying to
put on the personage that will please the audience you are with, while
eventually realizing, usually far into adulthood, that the audience you most need
to please is in the mirror.
Run, do not
walk, and get your tickets to this marvelous experience. Prepare to be transported
and transformed.
Linda
Drummond Johnson
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