The beginning of a beautiful friendship? Marinda Anderson (left) and Brittany Bellizeare as Odessa and Angela in Charly Evon Simpson’s Sandblasted.
Before the play Sandblasted even begins, it grabs the audience’s attention: They enter the theater to see a stage covered with sand—lots and lots of sand. Curiously, this sandy location appears to be indoors, as the set also includes a window on one side of the stage and doors on the other two. The play itself, however, may not stir the audience’s attention or curiosity—at least not for the full hour and 40 minutes (without intermission) of its running time. While Sandblasted features impassioned performances and some lovely two-person scenes, it tends toward the talky and abstruse.
Coproduced by Vineyard Theatre and WP Theater (formerly Women’s Project Theater), Sandblasted marks playwright Charly Evon Simpson’s follow-up to her 2019 breakout with the historical drama Behind the Sheet at EST. It’s also the off-Broadway debut of director Summer L. Williams, a cofounder of Company One, an award-winning Boston theater committed to social justice. Sandblasted was developed in WP’s emerging-artists residency, Pipeline, but its 2020 Pipeline Festival production was canceled by the pandemic.
Jamal (Andy Lucien, left) encounters Odessa (Anderson) in a bar.
Williams and Simpson, as well as all the actors and almost all the designers of Sandblasted, are people of color. And judging by who’s laughing a lot and singing along at the end, this is a play that seems more readily appreciated by Black theatergoers than white. If you’re in the latter group, this epigraph on the script (but not in the program) from poet Audre Lorde provides some helpful context: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
Simpson also includes a quote from Samuel Beckett on her script—fitting, as there’s a definite Waiting for Godot vibe to Sandblasted, with its two main characters seeking an ineffable something, devoted to a mysterious figure. The two are Angela and Odessa, young women who meet on a beach in one of several out-of-sequence scenes in Sandblasted. They are both facing the same problem: Parts of them—their nose, perhaps, or an arm—may start falling off. This condition threatens an entire segment of the population, and Angela and Odessa pin their hopes for relief on Adah, a celebrity wellness expert by virtue of her immunity to the whole parts-falling-off thing and, evidently, to aging as well. Adah leads them on a journey; its geography and goal are vague, but it involves trudging through, and occasionally burying themselves under, sand.
What Simpson is alluding to with this surreal story isn’t clear. Sandblasted could be a tribute to Black girl magic, or a rebuke of Black women’s marginalization (“So many are now speaking up about it,” says Angela, “talking about how they struggled with this for years, how good it feels now that it is more out in the open”). Or a sendup of our culture’s love of celebrity, self-help miracles and health fads. Or—in all its talk about an encroaching plague and the dangers of touching—a lament for pre-pandemic life (“I want to go back to just being there and not talking about how to survive, go back to just surviving, to just living,” says Adah).
Rolonda Watts (left), once a TV news and talk-show celebrity, now costars as Adah, a guru of sorts for Angela (Bellizeare, center) and Odessa (Anderson). Photographs by Carol Rosegg.
Or you could choose not to try to figure it out—in the very first scene, Adah scoffs at the tendency “to trust in something like time and sense”—and instead be absorbed by its experimental spirit and sense of sisterhood. The actors certainly go all-in to ground the off-kilter material in the here and now. Though their shouting overpowers any emoting in the play’s high-pitched opening minutes, Brittany Bellizeare and Marinda Anderson settle into their roles, and their vivid characterizations make nervous but spunky Angela (Bellizeare) and confident, brassy Odessa (Anderson) a fun and formidable pair. In a touch of meta-casting, TV newswoman-turned-actor Rolonda Watts—who once hosted an Oprah-ish talk show—plays the Oprah-ish Adah; her portrayal offers a balance of regality and levelheadedness suitable for the accidental celebrity. The cast’s fourth member is Andy Lucien, an affable presence as Angela’s brother Jamal, even though his part may not even be necessary.
Sandblasted’s titular set is designed by Matt Saunders, and it’s not just shellacked into place—the sand is dug into, dug up and otherwise moved around. Saunders also designed a sky of cotton clouds, which lighting designer Stacy Derosier transforms for different times of day. Montana Levi Blanco’s costumes range from bright orange and pink attire for Angela and Odessa in their pre-Adah lives to neutral earth tones during their quest in the sand. Sadah Espii Proctor on sound and Cookie Jordan on hair and wigs complete the design team.
Sandblasted runs through March 13 at Vineyard Theatre (108 W. 15th St.). Performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and 8 p.m. Saturday, with matinees at 3 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are available by calling (212) 353-0303 or visiting vineyardtheatre.org.
