Georgia (Deja Denise Green-left) and T.J. Kelly (SJ Hannah) share a light moment in the park during The Starter.
In the Roaring ’20s and Depression ’30s, women playwrights contributed substantively to the theater, but Black women playwrights’ work went largely unnoticed in the broader literary world. To counter this, Black magazine owners advertised contests to encourage new scripts. She’s Got Harlem on her Mind features three of Eulalie Spence’s four prizewinning scripts: The Starter (1923), Hot Stuff (1927), and The Hunch (1927). These one-act Harlem Renaissance vignettes reflect the everyday lives and cultures of its Black community. They provide a window into the hopes and shattered dreams of Harlem’s inhabitants.
Steve Collins (Dontonio Demarco, left) consoles an overwrought Mavis (Jazmyn D Boone), whose wedding dreams have been shattered in The Hunch.
For the revivals at the Metropolitan Playhouse, director Timothy Johnson has assembled a cast of highly skilled, versatile individuals. Nevertheless, from the initial group musical chant (Prelude and Entr’Acte music) through the curtain call, Johnson has created what is overwhelmingly an acting ensemble, both visually and in spirit.
Johnson has also contributed his own original, upbeat tunes that join those of 1920s music-makers Wendell Woods Hall and the team of composer Spencer Williams and lyricist Jack Palmer to reinforce the inherent inner rhythm with which the plays are infused. Yet their music belies the truly complex and compelling drama of urban Blacks’ multiple struggles during the Harlem Renaissance. Jervyn Nelm’s vivid costumes blend with the period décor but also accentuate that which is sensual about the women in all three stories.
In The Starter, a passionate young couple faces real financial difficulties. In Hot Stuff, that raw emotion also applies to the “numbers game” woman, who also hawks stolen merchandise; to her would-be white lover; and to her husband’s violence when he discovers them together. In The Hunch, a young woman lets loose unchained emotions after being ensnared by an unrepentant con artist and bigamist. So overwhelmingly do the emotions provide momentum for the plot that it’s difficult for an audience to refrain from being absorbed into the characters’ travails.
Seating for the production is tightly configured around an open floor that serves as the stage. This configuration and the theater’s limited capacity are also conducive to the sense of intimacy in each play. This intimacy is compounded by the strategic positioning of period furniture and props. Cast members carry them on and off the stage, placing them very deliberately. Around these items, the characters’ subtle, dramatic, and even violent interactions revolve. As both the director of fighting and intimacy, Katie Bradley ably positions the actors so that their physicality seems to generate a powerful emotional charge, notably in The Hunch.
Mavis (Boone, left) comprehends Bert’s duplicity and bigamy in The Hunch. Photographs by Kat DuPont Vecchio.
Although all three of Spence’s one-acts are masterfully constructed, The Hunch is the most powerful, in large part due to the dramatic impact of Jazmyn D. Boone’s performance as Mavis Cunningham. She may be petite in stature, but she is an emotional powerhouse. Her Mavis is absolutely riveting, from the moment she packs her suitcase for her wedding the following day, through the turbulent aftermath of her broken engagement. It’s almost as Mavis herself foreshadows that breakup when she tells her landlady, Mrs. Reed (Monique Paige), why she delayed inviting her mother and sister in Raleigh to the wedding:
I didn’t write ’em ’bout my getting married ’till yesterday. Yuh know, Mis’ Reed, there’s plenty a things can happen tuh break up a weddin’, ’specially in Harlem.
Mavis is inconsolable when Steve Collins (Dontonio DeMarco) exposes cunning bigamist Bert Jackson (Tyrell Wheeler). Bert’s aggrieved wife Lucinda (Raven Jeannette) is summoned by Steve, whose “hunch” about Bert’s duplicity is validated. Even after Bert’s infidelity is exposed, Mavis still longs to be reunited with him. As much as Mavis rages at Bert, she just as furiously visits her wrath on well-meaning, compassionate but somewhat socially inept Steve.
The Hunch is a fitting close to an evening in which Spence’s plays underscore the interdependencies of complex characters in 1920s Harlem. For its residents, relationships, economic hardships, traditions, questionable fidelities, family loyalties, and massive societal shifts all factor into unpredictable outcomes and uniquely moving stories. As much as Spence’s plays unravel part of Harlem’s time-locked cultural history and its socioeconomic changes, they also reference the ways in which she, and other Black women playwrights of that Renaissance harnessed the essence of a seminal era and made it accessible to wider audiences.
She’s Got Harlem on Her Mind runs through March 12 at the Metropolitan Playhouse (220 East 4th St.). Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays; matinees are at 3 p.m. on Sundays. For more information or to reach the box office, call (212) 995-8410 or connect@metropolitanplayhouse.org.
