BAYCHESTER AVE.—THE BRONX
Playwrights’ Center
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As premises for drama go, “this system sucks” is as good as any, I suppose. But playwright Dominic Taylor stacks the deck in his episodic narrative Baychester Ave.—The Bronx, conveniently ending scenes at the point when a rebuttal hangs in the air. A frustrated Fuquan answers Mr. A’s reminiscences of the radical 60s, for example, by demanding, “What has your struggle done for you? What have you got for your struggle?” The answer—three squares, a roof, and a job”—is so palpable we almost shout it out for him. But for Mr. A to say it would introduce argument to a play relentlessly focused on dead-end despair, and his function is to maintain that single note.
Director Michael E. Myers and his cast of seasoned players—most notably Trent Harrison Smith as the mercurial Fuquan and Willie B. Goodson as Mr. A—do what they can to give coherence to this mosaic, written in an arcane and virtually unintelligible urban argot. But they cannot salvage Taylor’s bleak denouement, in which those who attempt to build their ships fare no better than those who swim out to meet them or wait passively for them to come in. The ennui-soaked hostility of Baychester Ave.—The Bronx offers no spur to action, except perhaps urinating in the Wilson Avenue el station on the way home.
