Theater Review: Guirgis' Edgy Our Lady of 121st Street Entertains without Compelling

Our Lady of 121^st Street

Written by Stephen Adly Guirgis

Directed by Phylicia Rashad

Signature Theatre

The Pershing Square Theater, Manhattan

June 13, 2018

I have previously enjoyed two plays of Stephen Aldy Guirgis, Jesus Hopped the A Train (2000) and From Riverside to Crazy (2014), both which explore life on the underside of New York from the perspective of its black and Latino populations (Guirgis is Egyptian-Irish, but grew up in mixed race neighborhoods). The latter won the 2015 Pulitzer prize, so Guirgis’ soup of combustible, overt, and repressed ethnic anger seems quite resonant with our times. This revival of Our Lady of 121^st Street (2003) by Signature Theater is more of the same. If in the end it failed to deliver much new profound insight, it continues to show this playwright as a skilled craftsman with a good ear for dark humor, and a finely attuned sense for racial differences and interrelationships in our society.

The play has a formulaic basis: the gathering of a group of ex-high school classmates from a mixed-race Manhattan Catholic high school for the funeral of their not-so-beloved teacher Sister Rose.  Rose is  remembered for her mix of tough love and meanness. Things get off to a bad start when her body disappears, delaying the ceremony and forcing the classmates to hang around one another longer than perhaps is desirable (we never do find out what happened to her body). Guirgis avoids the usual high school reunion stereotypes of ex-lovers reuniting, bullied kid made good, etc. His varied characters all have distinct, and distinctly edgy personalities that abrade one another from start to finish. They include a not-so-out gay couple working out their issues, a part-time hooker (without a heart of gold), a foul mouthed female narcotics addict, a burned-out priest who cannot tolerate the confessional booth any longer, and a crotchety ex-cop who has somehow lost his pants. 

I liked the mix of anger and humor—perhaps reflecting Mr. Guirgis’ Irish background, and his refusal to fall into stereotypes for the most part. He seems least comfortable writing convincingly for the gay couple without resorting to traditional butch-femme roles, but overall he nails most of the characters. His humor allows him to take a pretty dim view of all of them without the whole thing becoming grim and cynical. His worldview is that people are pretty much out for themselves, and only perform benevolence when there is a good reason to do so. There are a number of plot twists—a big one hinges around a seemingly benign, cognitively-impaired young man who no one takes seriously, but actually has quite an independent, and ominous life circulating in the Harlem streets. Acting standouts were John Doman as Father Lux (who definitely gives off no healing light), Quincy Tyler Bernstein as Inez, a perpetually angry jilted wife of a rap star, and John Procaccino as Victor, who lost his pants immediately before the play starts. The direction of Phylicia Rashad keeps everything moving at a crisp pace, appropriate for the play. The very basic sets portraying a bar, a confessional, and a funeral parlor were minimalist, functional and non-distracting.

The 12 characters are so distinctly portrayed that there is never any confusion or wondering why the author inserted so many. In this he reminds me of the feat of Eugene O’Neill balancing and underlining each of his 17 characters in The Iceman Cometh. But where O’Neill somehow achieves a cosmic everyman significance with his large cast, Guirgis does not. Our Lady is a funny, entertaining, foul-mouthed set of character sketches, virtuosic in its construction and dialogue, but never takes that last step to making me really reflect about its subject matter of failed lives and the interdependence of people on each other (again like the theme of The Iceman Cometh).