Erik J. Bracciodieta and Derick Materu in String of Pearls | Photo from the company’s Instagram
Presented by Fuschia
I really struggled with this one. In her play, Fuschia Boston tackles an assortment of interrelated tensions from race and sexuality to gender and power. These are complex, relevant concerns worthy of examination. String of Pearls—presenting us with a failing theatre company and its marginally diverse group of thespians desperate to hold it together—is a very ambitious play; it is also, regrettably, rather clumsy.
At the top, Richard (Fred Kuhr), the new artistic director of the struggling troupe—an arrogant, manically over-eager closet case (imagine Corky St. Clair from Waiting For Guffman, but without the endearing vulnerability)—tells us that he’s going to bring life back to the theatre. He’s… a lot.
All of the white characters here—Richard, Lucas Blakely’s Aaron, and Erik J. Bracciodieta’s Saul—eventually reveal themselves to be a lot. They are inherently problematic in some way or another; while Halle (Boston) and Jed (Derick Materu)—the two Black characters—try to negotiate their way around the fetishes, traps and lazy (or deliberate!) obtuseness the white characters embody to deflect scrutiny and avoid properly acknowledging whatever privilege their white maleness affords them.
Boston’s script employs a variety of clever devices I appreciate. There is a fragmented quality, blurring the lines between reality and fiction, as scenes jump from the interactions of our main characters to the play they are rehearsing and fever dream abstractions on their concerns, which are also the thematic concerns of the play itself. How to retain a rich history while discarding, re-contextualizing or adapting aspects of culture that diminish some folks’ humanity—in other words, social progress. There are certain phrases that pop up between scenes, textual echos, that ask us to scrutinize how scenes relate to each other.
The performances are wildly varied. There are moments of satire, where I understand the performative artifice is deliberate, but certain characters seem to exist permanently in that contrived, heightened world while others do not. Kuhr and Bracciodieta especially remain cartoonishly mannered throughout, whereas everyone else tries to land on some nuance here and there, to varying degrees of success. Max Ackerman’s direction leans into whatever energy each actor brings to the table rather than establishing a firm framework.
There was one uncomfortable vignette in which I thought the play was going to wrestle properly with some of discomfiting ideas raised in Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play, but there simply isn’t the space allowed within this under an hour-long entry, let alone a brief scene. So we just get a taste.
Essentially, the play as a whole is a theatrical tasting. If I were to offer advice to playwright Boston, it would be to expand this into a full length work that affords everyone some nuanced humanity or else radically simplify and sharpen its satirical dimension.
