Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks is known for her outlandish imagination, creative use of language and boldly askew look at America’s past and history. Her mythic riff on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, cheekily titled Fucking A, is no exception.
Baltimore’s queer theater, Iron Crow, proves the perfect push-the-envelope match for Parks’ distinctive theatrics. They are more than up to the linguistic, musical, political and sexual demands of the play and their production crackles with danger and unsettling power.
Parks wrote Fucking A in 2000 and set it in a repressed, racist dystopian society. Here we are in 2017 Trump America, and the play’s setting is our new reality as we face a possible future of limited freedoms and suppressive culture. Even in her wildest dreams, she probably could not conceive that the surreal, cruel world of Fucking A might actually come true in her lifetime.
Logan Lynch’s set is very familiar and country—a log cabin-style space of hammered wood planks, a wooden swing and a farmhouse table. At the top of the stage sits a panel of actors, functioning like a profane Greek chorus as they translate the “Talk,” the imaginary and lewd language spoken in secret by the workers.
A small bluegrass band (Kevin Krause, David Engwall and Josh Eid-Reis) is at the back of the stage, playing Parks’ short, cutting songs. With many a nod to Brecht, Weill and Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, Parks’ play uses music, made-up language and expressionistic storytelling to bear witness to the pain and struggles of Hester Smith (Jessica Bennett), a loyal mother and member of the wretched working class.
The ragged “A” branded into her chest does not stand for “Adultery” but for “Abortionist.” No dismantling of women’s rights to their bodies in this post-apocalyptic society—Hester is in servitude day and night to the dictatorial Mayor (Jamil Johnson) and his rich-witch wife the First Lady (Cricket Arrison) getting rid of babies that women don’t want or cannot afford.
It’s dirty work that nobody else wants to do and to make matters worse, Hester is rebuked and condemned by her fellow workers, who spit “baby killer” and other invectives at her as she goes about her business. “It’s not that we love what we do/We just do it,” Hester sings in a hardscrabble duet with her only friend Canary Mary (Deirdre McCallister), a prostitute sleeping with the Mayor.
She performs her duties as a sacred rite, praying at an altar before and cleansing her hands after with ritualistic fervor. She is also pragmatic, saving money to visit and eventually free her son, who was imprisoned 12 years ago for stealing meat from the First Lady, for whom Hester worked as a domestic.
Hester struggles through the endless days, dreaming of being able to picnic with the son she idealizes. The reality is much harsher, since years of incarceration have turned him into an amoral creature known as Monster (a hardened, affecting Javier Orgando), who at one point chillingly admits “Better a monster than a boy. I made something of myself. It wasn’t hard.”
There is something positively Jacobean about Hester’s revenge plot, the dark sexuality and the lurid violence found in Fucking A. There isn’t a severed head in a bag, but there is a gleeful description of inserting a metal rod in one orifice and up through the throat recounted by the Hunters (the creepily good Caitlin Weaver, Martha Robichuad, Kelly Hutchinson), a trio of redneck bounty hunters who make the guys in “Deliverance” look like Quakers.
John Webster must be slapping his bodkin with delight at Parks’ flourishes of Jacobean tragedy, which this critic must admit is one of her secret pleasures. There is just something so forbidden and freeing about watching people being so awful and over the top. I mean, this play’s idea of romance is having the kindly Butcher (Jared Swain) woo the reluctant Hester by showing her how to humanely slaughter a pig.
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Want to go?
Fucking A
closes February 12, 2017
Details and tickets
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Director Stephen Nunn just dives in and wallows in the play’s excesses and dissipations, affirming Iron Crow’s manifesto to push boundaries and revel in the outliers. The cast goes the distance as well, playing their roles as if tough, folksy archetypes.
This is especially true of Bennett’s rooted, dug-in portrayal of Hester, who like Hawthorne’s heroine is a strong woman fierce in her love for her illegitimate son. You may not like what Hester does for a living but you are in thrall of her strength and her unshakable pursuit of survival.
Deirdre McCallister makes a wistful but pragmatic Canary Mary and she sings like a dream. As does Arrison’s First Lady, who delivers the song “Fidelity” with husky bravado. Swain’s Butcher provides a lovely soft note to the blare surrounding him. On the other hand, Kaya Vision’s depiction of prisoner Jailbait is snaky, sinuously craven perfection.
As evidenced in the title alone, Fucking A is anything but family fare. Yet it gives us a rich, terrifying glimpse of what America could become in its reckless quest to be “great again.”
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Fucking A by Suzan-Lori Parks . Directed by Stephen Nunns . Featuring: Cricket Arrison, Jessica Bennett, Rebecca Dreyfuss, Kelly Hutchinson, Jamil Johnson, Deirdre McCallister, Javier Orgando, Martha Robichaud, Jared Swain, Kaya Vision and Caitline Weaver . Musical Arrangement and Direction: Deirdre McCallister. Sound Design: Daniel Weissglass. Costume Design: Nicki Seibert. Set Design: Logan Lynch. Lighting Design: Cara Antico . Stage Manager: Grethcen Hylton . Produced by Iron Crow Theatre . Reviewed by Jayne Blanchard.
