THEATER
What’s a Girl to Do?
A teenager & a legendary fi gure make their ways in the world
BY CHRISTOPHER BYRNE
Tense and timely with a
healthy dose of absurdity,
C.A. Johnson’s “All
the Natalie Portmans”
is a small, but moving, story of
Keyonna, a 16-year-old Black girl
who identifi es as queer and struggles
to stay steady as the world
appears to collapse around her.
Her father has committed suicide.
Her mother, Ovetta, is an alcoholic
struggling to keep a roof over the
heads of Keyonna and her brother,
Samuel. Keyonna has a crush on
a childhood friend, Chantel. Chantel
freaked out after a sexual experience
with Keyonna and is now
sleeping with Samuel, which is
confusing and diffi cult for Keyonna.
Samuel, meanwhile, feels responsible
for Keyonna, but in his
earnestness he creates a situation
that lands him in juvenile detention.
It’s a lot.
To try to deal with all of this,
Keyonna has an imaginary friend
who just happens to be the actress
Natalie Portman. Natalie appears
at times of high stress for Keyonna
as characters from her movies.
Keyonna also maintains a “dream
board” on the wall behind the sofa
where she sleeps. It features pictures
of mostly white movie stars.
Despite her tenuous circumstances,
where homelessness looms
and her diet is largely dry cereal,
Keyonna is upbeat and determined
to write screenplays. She has a
natural sense of the power of narrative
as both a coping mechanism
and a possible path out of her current
life. She will not be deterred.
For Keyonna, the fantasy Natalie
Portman embodies that promise.
Keyonna is smart and a survivor,
and in Johnson’s confi dent and
direct writing she and the other
characters come off as authentic.
This is a play about the ways each
of the characters fi nds acceptance
and learns to deal with life as it
happens, which certainly is not
how it goes in the movies. Defects
and all, Johnson’s characters are
appealing because they are all always
trying to do better. The balance
Kara Young and Elise Kibler in C.A. Johnson’s “All the Natalie Portmans,” directed by Kate Whoriskey,
at MCC Theater through March 29.
of realism and absurdism is
poetic and compelling.
Kate Whoriskey directs with
simplicity and honesty that enhances
the lyricism — and darkness
— of the text. The cast is
excellent, giving the characters
depth and complexity. Renika Williams
plays Chantel with a balance
of heart and insecurity that
serves as a foil to Keyonna’s more
confi dent mien. Joshua Boone is
moving as Samuel, caught up in
adult responsibility too young.
Elise Kibler gives Natalie Portman
a winning jocularity and a commitment
to keeping Keyonna away
from the brink. Montego Glover is
powerful as Ovetta, a mother who
is too young and struggling with
her own identity. Kara Young as
Keyonna is extraordinary — the
vibrant force that drives the play.
Her character knows how to fi ght,
has wisdom beyond her year, and
refuses to be beaten.
DANIEL J. VASQUEZ
The play has a wonderful sense
of life’s incongruities and unfairness,
especially as juxtaposed
against romanticized Hollywood
myths. Like the new Netfl ix series
“I Am Not Okay With This,” which
also features a marginalized teen
trying to cope with a crazy world,
it is set in the past, but the struggle
to survive, even thrive amidst
the uncertainty and absurdity is a
compellingly contemporary theme.
Re-imagining old musicals to
fi t changing cultural sensibilities
is a tricky business. In the
case of a 60-year-old mediocre vehicle
like “The Unsinkable Molly
Brown,” muddling through Dick
Scanlan’s deconstruction and reconstitution
of Richard Morris’
original book is more a penance
than a pleasure. Program notes indicate
that none of the characters
existed as they did in the original,
and the score is cobbled together
from Meredith Willson’s original,
as well as other songs from his
catalog and new ones by Scanlan
and Michael Rafter. The intention
was to take a conventional musical
comedy love story based on the legend
that grew up around the reallife
Titanic survivor Molly Brown
and turn it into a tale of female
empowerment.
It doesn’t work. The mash-up of
an MGM-style musical and historical
realism is a bad marriage, and
the problems are apparent as soon
as the curtain rises. For all the
protestations of “wokeness,” Scanlan’s
reimagined Molly is nothing
more than a stock character who
relies largely on pluck and spunk
to get what she wants. Scanlan
provides no underlying character
development and confuses Molly’s
manic aggression with evolved
agency. Worse, in order to achieve
her ends, Molly has to emasculate
all the men around her, and there
is no justifi cation for why she becomes
pro-union or champions immigrants,
except because it angers
her husband and allows her to assert
herself in opposition to him.
In straining to be topical, Scanlan
has also thrown in a particularly
awkward scene near the end
where Molly makes some very
timely political arguments, and, of
course, someone has to say, “She
persisted.” It’s completely forced,
pandering, and tonally discordant.
At the end, it’s all for naught because
after separating from her
husband to be independent (something
not possible at the time without
her husband’s acquiescence
since she could have had no property
of her own), Molly races home
on the Titanic to attend to him
when he falls sick. Commanding
her lifeboat in the North Atlantic,
Molly realizes how much she loves
and needs her man after all and
is repentant for her mad self-absorption.
So, after all of this noise,
we’re back to the conventional musical
comedy trope that the only
real happiness for a woman rests
in being with a man.
➤ MOLLY BROWN, continued on p.33
March 12 - March 25, 2 32 020 | GayCityNews.com
/GayCityNews.com
