Shows For Days

photo: Joan Marcus

The trickiest part of crafting a memoir is getting your very personal story to speak to something universal and recognizable for a wide audience. The best works of autobiography -- whether on the page (think Helen Keller's The Story of My Life or, more recently, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking) or the stage (Long Day's Journey Into Night, The Glass Menagerie) -- burrow deep into their authors' most private, painful and significant life experiences to create work whose power supersedes the specific. In an era where memoirs are more ubiquitous than ever, it is becoming harder and harder to strike this balance.

Unfortunately, Douglas Carter Beane's Shows For Days (at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater) misses the mark by a wide margin. In telling his own story, Beane is so hyper-specifically focused on minutiae that you're left to wonder if the people he's writing about would care to spend time with -- much less recognize the humanity in -- themselves.

Bootycandy

By intermission, I found Bootycandy to be an entertaining, occasionally insightful, and random collection of skits. By the end of the play, I realized that Bootycandy is a smart, brave, wily, and important exploration of race, sexuality, and humanity, and an entertaining, very insightful, not-so-random collection of skits.

Phillip James Brannon, Jessica Frances Dukes,
Benja Kay Thomas, Lance Coadie Williams
Photo: Joan Marcus

Written and directed by the impressive Robert O'Hara, Bootycandy mainly presents scenes from the life of Sutter, a gay African-American. There are also scenes without Sutter. One of them, a rather extraordinary sermon, is clearly part of Sutter's story. Another, an almost mugging, seems out of left field, but turns out to be a set-up for a later scene. Together, they add up to an amazingly complex whole that depicts and often satirizes black culture, white culture, theatre culture, black homophobia, white homophobia, human stupidity, and the ways that difficult childhoods can warp people's souls.