Before playwright Lydia Diamond went to Broadway in 2011 with “Stick Fly,” her compelling and witty story of a wealthy black family on Martha’s Vineyard confronting secrets and prejudices, she honed her voice in small theaters in Chicago. (“Stick Fly” got its world premiere with Congo Square Theatre Company in 2006.) Now MPAACT, which first produced Diamond’s “The Inside” way back in 1998, offers a revised version in a sparkling, if sometimes discursive, production.
The revision comes not just in lines referencing Barack Obama and Idris Elba (neither of whom were on the radar in 1998), but in the fact that a piece that originally starred Diamond as Emma, along with two other actors playing multiple roles, is now strictly a solo affair, with the highly watchable Kristin E. Ellis doing the honors under Deidre Searcy’s direction.
The voice still feels very much like Diamond’s, however. Like her creator (who once described herself to the Tribune as “an academic brat”), Emma is the daughter of a peripatetic single mother and scholar whose career takes her from small-town Mississippi to stuffy New England. Like Diamond, grown-up Emma ends up in Chicago right after college, which forms the setting for the “now” portion of the play — a party stuffed with the kind of self-regarding white liberals so often skewered by Bruce Norris, where Emma is the lone black woman.
But where Norris tends to the broad outlines of his characters, Diamond’s piece, as the name implies, is concerned very much with Emma’s interior life, and on what it feels like to be “inside” a world where one never wholly belongs. And though I haven’t yet seen Justin Simien’s film “Dear White People,” I get the sense from what I’ve read about it that Emma would, in fact, fit in pretty well in Simien’s story.
Diamond brings out many facets of Emma’s personality and history as she negotiates the increasingly alienating world of the party. (At one point, hearing a gaggle of privileged white women discuss their perceived oppression causes Emma to acidly note, “This is what is meant by white noise.”) Through flashbacks, we see her as an imaginative kid in the South, convinced that boa constrictors will climb her tree and eat her. (Mom is not in a mood to indulge these terrors.) Later, she’s a resentful violin student because her family believes that kids should study a musical instrument “until economic independence or death.”
It’s a supercharged, hyperliterate and often very funny journey, and Ellis commits with joyous, if sometimes raw, energy and passion. I didn’t see the multiactor version, but placing all the voices that have guided Emma — and sometimes almost torn her up — within one performer underscores the complexity and complications of life as a smart and sensitive black woman. Diamond’s Emma may have the “independence of the invisible,” but “The Inside” makes it painfully clear that it comes at a palpable cost.
“The Inside”
3 STARS
Through Nov. 30, Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave., $21-$25 at 773-404-7336 or mpaact.org