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In the middle of a prim church banquet, young Ernestine Crump's new white stepmother suddenly strips off her dowdy dress to reveal a black sequined gown, and growls a sexy cabaret song in a raspy Marlene Dietrich voice.
"At least...I wish she had done that", Ernestine wistfully sighs. Instead, we learn, her family sat for hours in uneasy silence, picking at their food.
It's that rueful gap -- between the black-and-white reality of a beleaguered teenager's family troubles and the colorful world of her fantasies and hopes -- that playwright Lynn Nottage ably illuminates in her drama "Crumbs from the Table of Joy", now playing at Karamu's Arena Theatre. Although the play has some second act weaknesses, its compassionate portrayal of a family at sixes and sevens rings true, with director Caroline Jackson-Smith finding many touching moments.
It's 1950, and 17-year-old Ernestine is living under twin shrouds of grief and displacement. Her recently widowed father has moved her and her younger sister Ermina (a regally pouty Princess Thomas) north from Pensacola to a bunker-like basement apartment in Brooklyn. For spiritual guidance, Godfrey has turned to the religion of Father Divine, whose hyper-puritanical commandments -- no smoking, dancing, drinking, radio on Sundays, or sex, even for married couples -- have cast a pall over the household.
Into their hermetic gloom sashays her coy, flirtatious aunt Lily, swilling bourbon, talking Communism, and shimmying seductively in her chic Fifth Avenue suit and leopard print scarf. (Shannon Fischer Titas's costumes are just right.) Frustrated by her erratic influence and poleaxed by her sheer carnal temptation, Godfrey flees into the arms of Gerte, a hungry German immigrant he meets on the subway, and impulsively brings her home as his wife.
The cast has a fine chemistry, creating one of those families where you manage to care about each of the flawed antagonists. Rebecca Hendricks is a sexy, irritating Lily: she makes you see how her ambivalent mix of magnetism, selfishness, and will could ignite Godfrey's apoplexy, yet provide the alchemy Ernestine needs to grow an independent self. Wry and pragmatic, Robbin Lomax is a superb Gerte, straining to reach over the gulfs of race and nationality to be a good stepmother and wife.
Tony Sias plays Godfrey as a man of underlying warmth and quicksilver moods, who carries his devotion to Father Divine like a heavy harness: You can see it visibly rein him in. His revelation scene -- a confessional litany of his daily burdens, written on a blizzard of prayerful notes to "Sweet Father" -- is very moving.
Princess Thomas has both deliciously wicked sass and a vulnerable center to her boy-crazy Ermina, who scat-sings in order to drown out the adults' bickering.
In the central but less realized role of poetic narrator, Jessica Rambo is focused and effective as the solemn Ernestine. Unfortunately, she has far too much plot to carry in Nottage's overlong second act, which suffers from several false endings after the main conflict seems to be resolved. But in those few wondrous magic-realist moments -- where she imagines her family stepping through the frame, temporarily bursting the straitjackets of their conflicts and repressions -- Nottage's work soars.