Ain’t no mountain high enough to throw shade on Jacqueline “Jackie” Marie Butler (the incandescent, triple threat Felicia Curry), the heroine of Caleen Sinnette Jennings’ world premiere play Queens Girl: Black in the Green Mountains, the third and final (wah!) installment of Jennings’ coming of age trilogy.
The play is the first in Everyman Theatre’s inaugural New Voices Festival and if there’s ever a profound reason to be in a public space with sneezing and coughing patrons (who called out “It’s allergies!” every time they achoo-ed or hacked. Felicia Curry must have nerves of steel), this is it.
As fans of her previous plays—Queens Girl in the World and Queens Girl in Africa—know, Jackie survived (with soul and style) a Queens childhood that teetered between the rough streets and the propriety and proper representation of her home life and her family’s adventurous move to Nigeria during her high school years that was an heady mix of homeland pride, longing for America, and the stirrings of first love.
In Queens Girl: Black in the Green Mountains, Jackie goes from the tropical climes of Nigeria to Bennington College in Vermont, a clean green and white expanse she fell in love with at age 13 after seeing a picture of the campus in a catalog. “White, white Vermont,” Jackie notes, eying the white girls, white rooms and clapboard buildings and the white stuff, snow.
Queens Girl: Black in the Green Mountains closes April 12, 2020. DCTS details and tickets
The year is 1968 and Jackie is one of 12 black students out of 500. The dozen become the BBG (Bennington Black Girls) and they become a tight-knit group, with Curry shape-shifting into everyone from the militant stoner Sherrie to a sweet-as-pie southern belle willing to tow the line to get to med school no matter what. Their nickname for Jackie, by the way, is “Tinkerbell.”
Jackie trods both paths—rebellion and risk taking (and her brand of daredevilry is so charmingly in keeping with her good girl personality) as well as a representing her people and therefore watching her every move. She wonders where —and if—she’ll fit in, and is she a token, a role model, or something else more absolutely herself?
The unrest of that era in America—the Vietnam War, protests and riots, the civil rights and feminist movements—are juxtaposed with the restlessness in Jackie’s soul as she tries to figure out who she is, what’s her purpose, who to love (if anyone) and what being black means to her.
She finds herself not as an English major, as planned, but in the drama department, where she throws herself body, mind and heart into all aspects of the theater, devouring plays like chocolate drops and taking on all sorts of roles (“there’s no part too small,” advises family friend Rudy Dee) and realizing that all the parts, all the stories, are, and have always been, nestled inside her.
Using narration, poetry, music and dance, A Queens Girl: Black in the Green Mountains takes us back to that rich, feverish time of our college years, in which time moves, in Jennings’ measured and generous voice, either in “a blur” or “spools like pastel ribbon.”
The story is uniquely, wonderfully Jackie’s, but Jennings’ storytelling abilities are so embracing that you are transported back to the exhilarating uncertainties and “who am I today?” escapades of college life. The audience laughed, hmmm-ed and nodded in recognition as Curry swept us through Jackie’s four years at Bennington, the crowd clapping and leaping to their feet at the sight of Jackie near the end in her tasseled cap as if we were the ones graduating.
Curry held us in the palm of her hand from the very first moment she steps onto Lawrence E. Motten’s simple set of artfully-piled luggage (which Curry opens to grab props and costume changes), a steamer trunk and an easy chair. The backdrop of mountains, autumn leaves and a white picket fence gives a New England-y feel to the proceedings.
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She impersonates everyone from her island-born father and decorous mother, to her seductive, long-distance boyfriend Gilliam, and various professors, admissions officers, fellow students with horsey laughs and cracking gum and Scotch-swilling relations with ease coupled with a keen sense of observation. Nothing misses Jackie’s eye or Curry’s, either.
Curry is a triple threat, as mentioned before—she can sing, dance, and act. We see her dancing up an existential storm when European avant-garde theater hits the Bennington campus. Later, in an unforgettable scene of poignancy and grit, she slumps back to campus carrying her luggage with Willy Loman weariness, homesick for Queens and Africa, and breaks into an impromptu chorus of “Green Mountain Blues.” When she executes a high kick in tune with the music, you just can’t love a character—or a performance—more.
After viewing the other two plays, audiences were eager to find out what happened to Jackie Marie Butler. Queens Girl: Black in the Green Mountains, which you need to see for yourself, satiates your curiosity, sews up loose ends, and, like Jackie herself, leaves you with your heart open and soul aglow for what’s next.
Queens Girl in the Green Mountains by Caleen Sinnette Jennings . Director: Paige Hernandez. Featuring Felicia Curry. Set Design: Lawrence E. Moten, III. Lighting Design: Sarah Tundermann. Costume Design: Ivania Stack. Sound Design: David Lamont Wilson. Stage Manager: Jamie J. Kranz . Produced by Everyman Theatre . Reviewed by Jayne Blanchard.
