Radar Redux.com is expanding the traditional concept of journalism, to cover a wide array of Baltimore Arts and Culture.
“You once said that Nat and Lillie had answers to every question in the world. What should I play to give me answer to stop this?” In this line, Maria (Gretchen Hall), a Polish immigrant in her twenties, appeals to the music of Nat King Cole in a desperate plea to stop Alfred (Avery Brooks), an older West Indian man dying of cancer, from ending his life. Mirroring the beginning of the play, the pair is momentarily at cross-purposes, but this time there is a real connection between them.
Though Nat and “Lillie” the gramophone are not actors in Let There Be Love – Kwame Kwei-Armah’s play which made its American debut at CENTERSTAGE on February 17th – they are still critical characters. The universality of music and its power to facilitate human connections is one of the take-away messages of this play. Jazz transcends nationality and race by bringing an unlikely pair, Alfred and Maria, together despite their disparate backgrounds.
Let There Be Love begins after Gemma (Pascale Armand) has brought her father home from the hospital. From the beginning there is tension between them and their arguments go far beyond typical father-daughter quibbles. Behind his back, Gemma decides to hire someone from a home-help agency to care for Alfred. When Maria arrives, Alfred is at first resistant to her assistance and company, going after her with his cane and exploding in anger when she touches Lillie.
Alfred and Maria eventually form a friendship founded on a shared love of music. He introduces her to the world of Nat King Cole and they first bond over a recording of Get Your Kicks on Route 66. Maria loves Madonna and the Sex Pistols and at one point lip-synchs to Anarchy in the U.K. It is notable that just the act of sharing his music with Maria has a healing effect on Alfred. (The healing power of jazz is not a new concept. Jazz legend Louis Armstrong used to send records to a hospital in New Orleans because he believed it could help women who were giving birth.) This in turn enables him to reach out to Maria by offering her a room in his home when he discovers that she is being abused by her boyfriend. This act of generosity and love is the first step Alfred takes towards becoming a better man.
Friendship is mutually healing. We find out that Alfred has terminal cancer which is rapidly spreading to his bones. Maria urges him out of the house (hence their shopping trip to IKEA) and convinces him to fly to Grenada in order make peace with his ex-wife and the mother of Gemma.
If this plot line sounds staid so far, it’s not. Alfred’s volatile personality becomes a source of great humor. Whether it is the shock effect of hearing an old man refer to his daughter as a Pussyhole, the way Maria considers IKEA to be second only to heaven, or Alfred and Maria rocking out to Like a Virgin by Madonna, this play never falls into the trap of taking itself too seriously, but still addresses the pertinent issue of immigration.
In some ways, the protagonist of Let There Be Love channels 1970s sitcom star Archie Bunker. Alfred is loud mouthed, provocative, and while he does not call Maria a Polack (Archie uses this term to denigrate his son-in-law in All in the Family), his resentment towards immigrants is apparent in other ways. Unlike Archie, as a West Indian residing in London, Alfred understands on some level what it means to be marginalized. This in part is the foundation for the friendship between Alfred and Maria.
What Kwame Kwei-Armah does in his play is extraordinary. He lights a fire under the stereotype of Eastern European immigrants in order to force us to reexamine our own prejudices. Kwei-Armah draws upon experiences from his youth in which Asian and West Indian Brits viewed the new wave of immigrants with hatred and resentment for stealing their jobs and their women. Yet they seemed to have forgotten that they too were once foreigners just a generation before. Kwei-Armah wants to underline the importance of understanding our history in order to break the cycle of prejudice.
This play is extremely relevant for American audiences as well. Our views towards immigrants into the United States are less then welcoming. Perhaps the prejudice is in a different form, but it is still there. It seems to be the social milieu nowadays to complain about how all our jobs are being outsourced to India and to prevent Mexican-Americans from legally obtaining citizenship. But it is important to remember that we all immigrated from another part of the world at one point or another.
Let There Be Love
Kwame Kwei-Armah
February 10th – March 7th, 2010
CENTERSTAGE
700 North Calvert Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21202
410.332.0033
Tags: Avery Brooks, CenterStage, Gretchen Hall, Jeremy B. Cohen, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Let There Be Love, Pascale Armand
Filed Under: Feature Sights
No Comments