Chuck Smith’s glorious Goodman Theatre production of Lynn Nottage’s “Crumbs From the Table of Joy” has none of that dreary non-profit earnestness that often accompanies regional-theater plays involving race.
No one lectures from the stage. There are no post-modern accouterments that leave you aching for a story. And audience members do not sport those fixed but transparent smiles that reveal they occupy their seats not for pleasure but because they feel they should consider, or be seen to consider, a world other than their own.
Instead, this show has truth, humor, irony and a heart as big as a borough. And it pops with a Broadway kind of crackle.
Few Chicagoans know or have seen this memory play about growing up black in 1950s Brooklyn before. Plays by the prolific and capable Nottage have been showing up everywhere from Steppenwolf to the Next Theatre these last couple of years, but this 1996 offering is far and away her best script to date. It’s in a whole other realm from all else she has so far penned — when produced at this level, at least. The theater throbs to the beat of exceeded expectations.
Few things are as much fun in the theater as watching the moneyed Goodman opening-night patrons, fresh from their receptions and networking, finding themselves drawn, like business-suited minnows, so thoroughly into a show they clearly didn’t expect to grip them in such a pleasurable vise.
Whatever its multifarious thematic merits — sophistication of theme; big-hearted compassion for disparate characters; a sense that the social ideas in play only enlarge and complicate as the night progresses — the most important thing to know about Smith’s “Crumbs” is that it offers a very, very good time in the company of immensely likable characters, beautifully realized.
Its structure is not radical — is some ways it’s not so different from Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach” series. Nottage’s lower-middle-class teenage narrator Ernestine Crump (Nambi E. Kelley) comes of age in a loving but dysfunctional Brooklyn stew made up of a sassy sister (Bakesta King), a well-meaning but uptight and spiritually confused widower of a father (John Steven Crowley) and his colorful, communist, free-living Uptown sister-in-law Lily (Ella Joyce). Things get crazy when Poppa suddenly gets involved with Gerte, a white woman (Karen Janes Woditsch) of German extraction.
But they don’t get that crazy. Part of Nottage’s point here is to observe that people of good heart can and must learn to deal with the many ways a family cookie — be it vanilla or chocolate — can crumble.
Smith has cast the show exquisitely. The superb Joyce, who originated the role of Lily in New York, offers one of those rare extravagant performances that’s thoroughly rooted in reality. She lifts everyone else. Crowley, an earnest and authentic Chicago actor with a bead of sweat perpetually in the middle of his brow, never has been better. Woditsch, who has hitherto lacked this kind of chance, is dazzlingly good in a very tough role. And except for the end, when she briefly loses control and goes over the top, Kelley creates a character of such longing and heart that you find yourself craving her happiness. It’s quite the feast of acting — and Linda Buchanan’s set houses it with a remarkable sense of freshness.
Most adults eventually figure out that we are who we are thanks to a weird and contradictory mix of influential adults who try but fail to cancel each other out. Who’d have it any other way? That’s the message of the play. And director Smith, who has knocked this one out of the park, lets this humanistic show breathe and bounce.
“Crumbs From the Table of Joy”
When: Through June 25
Where: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St.
Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes
Tickets: $10-$35 at 312-443-3800
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