If the phrase, “the show must go on,” was ever supremely apropos, it was May 4 at Aurora Theatre in Berkeley. Faced with the lead actor falling ill during a run of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage’s Crumbs From the Table of Joy, the previous night’s production had been forced to cancel. Sunday’s matinee presented artistic director Josh Costello and the play’s director, Elizabeth Carter, with a dilemma and a reconfigured version of the familiar saying: “Must the show go on, and if so, how?”
And so it was that despite the Trump administration cancelling existing or pending federal funding, despite having raised significant local support to escape a severe financial deficit in the last 12 months and despite the illness of actor Anna Marie Sharpe, who was to play Ernestine Crumb, the valiant understudy Courtney Williams appeared script-in-hand, and the show went on.
Degrees of separation in a scene or from the other actors varied, and Williams, a more-than-capable actor, deserves a salute for managing at times to imbue the role with her character’s unique features. Ernestine holds a sincere love of films, timidity but curiosity about life beyond her fate as a young Black girl growing up in 1950s’ Brooklyn, NY and a slow-but-rising resistance to her father’s dictating what the future Ernestine might do, think, dream about, achieve.
The memory play is told through action and Ernestine’s occasional narration that breaks the fourth wall and describes their lives. Following the death of the family’s matriarchal anchor and hoping to escape racism in the Florida Panhandle, widower Godfrey (David Everett Moore) packs up his grief and, along with Ernestine and her younger sister, Ermina (Jamella Cross), uproots the family to move north. In Brooklyn, a basement apartment becomes a house of want.
Godfrey wants answers to questions that plague him and faux-finds it in Father Divine, the leader of a cultish spiritual movement who strips life of all joy with “say no to” policies regarding music, dance, cinema, alcohol, good food and more. Ernestine wants life to be like Hollywood, glamorous and glittery with happy endings everywhere. Ermina wants to have fun and romantic skirmishes with boys.
Joining the family is another character with more desires: Godfrey’s sister-in-law, Aunt Lily Ann (Asia Nicole Jackson), is educated but beaten down by a white world disinterested in a “smart colored woman.” She moves in, ostensibly to care for the girls but hoping to rekindle flames of attraction with Godfrey. Her advances denied, she seeks relief in bourbon, sexual exploits and post-World War II bebop, especially that of her favorite musician, Charlie “Yardbird” Parker.
After Godfrey goes awol for three days and on the subway meets a German woman still trembling with the after-effects of surviving the Holocaust, the family is joined by a new stepmother, Gerte Schulte (Carrie Paff). Gerte wants primarily safety and, as an immigrant to the United States, a place to call home within a loving family.
Jackson, in her portrayal as a Black woman sapped of opportunity and stripped of power and respect by a male-dominated, white world, demonstrates tremendous range. Paff rises to the same level and is especially convincing as something like a bird frightened by unseen predators or, in one of the play’s frolicking dream sequences, standing atop a table dressed in a silk evening gown and belting out “Can’t Help Falling In Love” as if she were Marlene Dietrich.
As the younger sister whose underlying tension is expressed in a vibrating leg that erupts during moments of tension, Cross shows great early promise. She is a gymnastic performer, with physical tumbles and vaults contributing to well-timed pauses and effective side looks that add up to Ermina’s spunky profile.
The costume, set, sound and lighting designs are finely attuned, supporting without overwhelming an emphasis on character or upstaging Nottage’s artistic vision. Crumbs premiered 30 years ago and is clearly ambitious in the topics covered—communism, racism, religious dogmatism, gender oppression and more.
Taking a note from Crumbs, choose to see the play and celebrate revolution, deny the tyranny of oppression, and experience the joy of human beings and their dreams rising above and beyond circumstance.
‘Crumbs From the Table of Joy,’ through May 25, Aurora Theater, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley, 510.843.4822; auroratheatre.org.
