Theater: Downtown Race Riot fails to impress as a social barometer

Downtown Race Riot

Written by Seth Zvi Rosenfeld

Directed by Scott Elliot

Starring David Levi, Chloë Sevigny

Pershing Square Signature Center

November 25, 2017

Downtown Race Riot is a new play that joins many others in examining racial tensions from new perspectives, here returning to the grim days of New York City in the 1970’s for inspiration. The set was immediately nostalgic for me; a kitchen/dining room and two bedrooms replete with floral wallpaper and green cabinet paint similar to my parents’ décor of the era. Except for Chloë Sevigny (HBO’s Big Love) as a strung-out mother getting by with love but little sense, the cast was of young relative unknowns with limited professional credits, all portraying teens and young adults trying to negotiate the turbulence of the era. The play centers on the performance of Jimmy “P-nut” Shannon (an angelic-faced David Levi, second from right below, previously a child star in Nickelodeon’s The Naked Brothers Band). P-nut is a 19 year old high school dropout caught between his friendship for a black schoolmate “Massive” (the classic 1970’s reference is to his penis) and loyalties to his otherwise white/latino buddies. The play builds around two complementary sources of tension. First, the boys intend to participate in a race riot in downtown Manhattan, designed to “get” Puerto Ricans and black rivals. The sensitive P-nut is reluctant to participate, despite his friend Massive’s eagerness to go. Massive will supposedly help his white buddies assault downtown blacks, protecting himself from friendly fire by wearing a special head band (one of several unlikely plot devices in this play). The second tension involves the gang’s intended delivery of their buddy Massive to local mafia for presumed execution because of his sexual activity with one of the Mafiosi’s daughters. Thrown into this goulash are 1970’s Travolta-esque disco costumes, urban decay, mother’s drug abuse, vague homosexual undertones, and a promiscuous sister who has sex with Massive as her brother stews in the next room (is he jealous of her? protective?). This is a lot to cover, and the two main violent plot foci are one too many and prevent one another from becoming our true fear or focus. The model for this type of NYC ethnic working-class drama is perhaps Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, but playwright Rosenfeld is not adept enough to get through it all while still maintaining Miller’s dramatic tension. A great deal of complex, conflicting emotion is asked of 19 year old P-nut, and David Levi does not manage to convey the conflicting sexual, aggressive, and emotional demands well enough to carry the play, mostly looking confused or helpless throughout, and lacking the violent undertone that would make the play’s plot and climactic fight scene convincing. Sevigny, the sole “star” (third from right, below), and an actress capable of great complexity and darkness (see Big Love) is good as his sad mother, but is not really asked to do much more here than to be lovingly angry or strung out, so is undertaxed in her role. 

The reason for this play is clearly to examine racial tension from the standpoint of another era, but because of the diffuse structure and the distractions of the dated and now-silly look of 1970’s people (disco shirts, platform heels), it is hard to draw the analogies desired by the playwright. This is ultimately an unsatisfying gemish that does not integrate or maintain adequate dramatic tension.  While the use of “normal guys” without much acting experience as the boys in the gang can be effective to increase naturalism, it largely fails here. Was this a real directorial choice, or was the budget blown in contracting Sevigny? In any case, see the excellent film The Florida Project for a much more satisfying glimpse into the multi-ethnic world of working class Americans, including a similar, but far better written role for a drug-addicted loving mother and vastly better performances by naturalistic neophyte actors.