Blacktop Sky paved with good intentions
The 34 scenes of Blacktop Sky, a 90-minute one-act by Christina Anderson premiering on the Unicorn Theatre’s Jerome Stage, are necessarily abbreviated. Some last mere seconds. Yet the play’s atypical unfolding feels drawn out.
Directed by Mykel Hill, Sky captures our attention at first with a dynamic and telling portrayal of the conflicts and distrust between police and residents in the urban core. Around here, law enforcement translates “I didn’t do anything” as an admission of guilt. And this helps set the tone for life in a housing project — its limits, demoralization, dysfunction, dangers — under a sky between the high-rises that appears, in a character’s mind, too flimsy and insubstantial to hold ideas or dreams.
A homeless man, Klass, or “Pigeon” (Tosin Morohunfola), appears and starts to set up house in and around a bench on the blacktop of the housing project’s common area. He’s young, and he wears a winter coat in the heat of June. He meets 18-year-old Ida (Chioma Anyanwu), a recent high school grad living in one of the project’s four buildings with her mother. This young woman’s boyfriend, Wynn (Frank Oakley III), also comes in contact with this stranger.
Does Ida’s interest in Klass stem from curiosity, or does she want to help him? It’s unclear. Over many interactions among the characters — Ida and Klass, Ida and Wynn, Klass and Wynn — we slowly learn snippets of their aspirations and of their pasts. These infrequent revelations are sometimes sweet and sometimes painful. But the staccato scenes are like clicks of a camera’s shutter, opening windows that are too quickly closed.
Anyanwu has a strong, charismatic stage presence. But her character’s limited dimension can’t get out from behind a hard, perhaps protective, shell that restricts our view inside. Morohunfola is onstage for nearly all the play’s duration, and he gives a focused and physical portrayal. His Klass is damaged and sometimes dangerous, but also sympathetic. As written, he remains a mystery, leaving unresolved his character’s story and purpose. Oakley, a theater student, gives us a solid Wynn, who offers promise and equilibrium in a diffuse script.
The suspicion, distrust and fear that pass between these individuals are sometimes as fixed as between residents and police. They often push each other’s buttons, sometimes intentionally, and further escalate their conflicts and create distance. We can only wonder if this is an expression of their disrupted lives and the apathy that surrounds them.
This provocative play raises some issues and many questions, and its choppy narrative and labored unraveling primarily cloud its sky.
