Choir Boy by Tarell Alvin McCraney. Riverside’s National Theatre of Parramatta at Canberra Theatre Centre, March 29 – April 2, 2023.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 1
Directed by Dino Dimitriadis and Zindzi Okenyo
Musical Director: Allen René Louis
Executive Producer: Joanne Kee; Co-Executive Producer: Craig McMaster
Producer: Daniel Cottier
Set realisation: PaperJam Productions
Costume Designer: Rita Naidu
Lighting Designer: Karen Norris; Sound Designer: Brendon Boney
Choreographer: Tarik Frimpong
Associate Musical Director Zara Stanton; Dialect Coach Angela Sullen
Intimacy Director Cessalee Stovall; Casting Director Rhys Velasquez
Creative Futures: Assistant Director Masego Pitso
Stage Manager Adrienne Patterson; Company Manager Jen Jackson
Assistant Stage Manager Alice Cavanagh
Production Manager Daniel Potter; Production Associate Hannah Crane
Lighting Realisation (tour): Sammy Reid
Social and Community Engagement AJ Lamarque and Arran Munro
Cast:
Darron Hayes
Gareth (Gaz) Dutlow
Robert Harrell
Abu Kebe
Tawanda Muzenda
Quinton Rofail Rich
Tony Sheldon
Theo Williams
Zarif
I think that I have never seen a play as intimate as Choir Boy has been – for me, at any rate.
Tarell
Alvin McCraney is an American playwright, screenwriter, and actor. He
is the chair of playwriting at the Yale School of Drama and a member of
the Steppenwolf Theatre Ensemble. He co-wrote the 2016 film Moonlight,
based on his own play, for which he received an Academy Award for Best
Adapted Screenplay. [Wikipedia]
In his program note he writes: In
2007, I began writing Choir Boy. I completed a degree that year and
believed I would never be in a formal school setting as a student again.
My education about the world, its joy and cruelty, were far from over,
but I was reflecting a great deal about the education system in my home
country, state, city, and even neighborhood. What were the pieces of
history, the modes of story telling, and the unspeakable and yet
powerfully legible lessons, passed on to me in that 20-year period?
What was I to do it with it?
The
history and modes of story-telling at my all boys’ English grammar
school were entirely different from that of his American all boys’ high
school. We sang Anglican hymns each Monday morning in an otherwise
secular Enlightenment setting; his Afro-American choir boys sang
spirituals in an intensely religious setting encapsulated in the words
‘trust and obey’ – which did not only apply to Jesus.
It was the Spiritual Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long ways from home which connected with me, having never forgotten the rendition by Odetta in her 1960 Odetta at Carnegie Hall
album. By then I was well-settled in Australia, but the feeling was
there even as I was completing my degree just like Tarell McCraney in
2007.
I need to say at this point, as a matter of simple fact
with no moral judgement, that I was never attracted to another boy as
happens in Chorus Boy, though I was ‘unmanly’ and known as
'Muscles' because I didn’t have any. In this play McCraney opens up the
boys’ confusions about their relationships, about being a ‘true man’,
mixed in with their need for mothers and security, as well as the
history of their forebears’ slavery – which I had come to understand
from Odetta’s singing the song which played a powerful role in the
movement for racial equality in USA.
Disturbingly, I note that the Pew Research centre reported in 2019 that More
than four-in-ten Americans say the country still has work to do to give
black people equal rights with whites. Blacks, in particular, are
skeptical that black people will ever have equal rights in this country.
www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/04/09/views-of-racial-inequality
The story-telling in Choir Boys
is superbly done. Though as Tarell did, Pharus does succeed in
graduating, there is a sense of foreboding as the play ends. But surely
we can hope that we will Vote Yes for our First Nations to at least
have a Voice in our Constitution. Choir Boys raises this sort of question and exposes hypocrisy in education and politics.
In
other words this is a play for which the National Theatre of
Parramatta, a city central to Australia’s multicultural way of life,
must be congratulated. The design, directing, singing and choreography
are inspiring to watch, to respond to with humour and depth of feeling,
and to think about on reflection.
This is the answer to the
author’s question, What was I to do with it? Riverside’s National
Theatre has done it absolute justice.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
