What’s the harm in dreaming? Funny you should ask. Playwright Lynn Nottage’s story, written after she discovered a photo of her own great-grandmother and started wondering about the person in the picture, gives us a woman who has had a bellyful of reality, to the point where just being able to support herself as a seamstress feels like a miracle. Even so, she has managed to keep a grander dream alive: to someday save enough to open a beauty parlor for her fellow black women in turn-of-the-century New York, a place where they can have some comfort in this life. But hearts are hungry things, with a hearty appetite for any number of fond fantasies, even late-in-life love. And when the letters start to pour in from a lonely canal-digger in Panama, well, hope is a powerful drug. (Plus, he writes like a gentleman.) But while there is an air of culmination to their eventual meeting, it is by no means a conclusion, and reality has a way of setting in. It’s a tough tale, carefully engineered to break nearly every heart on display, some more than once. Still, as director Jasmine Bracey notes, it’s not a tragedy — a broken heart is not the same as a broken person. And now we come to the inevitable clothing metaphor, one that touches on the fact that of course, a play is itself a fantasy, blunt reality gussied up the way lingerie fancifies a prostitute. Nottage’s expertly rendered dialogue serves as the shapely corset that lets the actors cut the required figure, but it’s still up to them to perform, and that’s the real wonder here. Lead Nedra Snipes, in particular, manages the daunting task of playing someone simple but deep, terrified but determined, and perhaps most daunting of all, human but good. It is a grace to watch her.
Admission/Cost: $49 - $74
Location:
North Coast Repertory Theatre
987 Lomas Santa Fe Drive
Solana Beach, CA
Dates and times:
From January 10 to February 4, 2024
Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays - 8:00 PM
Sunday Matinees - 2:00 PM
