Theatre review: Best of Enemies tells a true story of racial détente
Credit to Author: Jerry Wasserman| Date: Sun, 01 Mar 2020 23:06:14 +0000
Best of Enemies
When: To Mar. 21
Where: Pacific Theatre
Tickets & Info: $20-$36.50 at pacifictheatre.org
If you liked the movie Green Book, Best of Enemies might be the play for you. Based on true stories, both dramatize an unlikely individual relationship between black and white that somehow manages to overcome personal enmity as well as racial, political and historical difference.
I’m not giving anything away to reveal in general terms how this play ends. The Pacific Theatre program includes information about the real people and their ongoing friendship after the events chronicled in Mark St. Germain’s adaptation from the book of the same title by Osha Gray Davidson.
The script reduces the book’s cast of characters to four, and the actors in Ian Farthing’s production do a very good job shaping the material they’re given. The problem for me lies in the nature of St. Germain’s theatrical shorthand.
Set in Durham, North Carolina, in 1971, the play opens three years earlier with C.P. Ellis’ shocking celebration of the assassination of “Martin Lucifer Coon.” The Exalted Cyclops of the local Ku Klux Klan chapter, played with horrifying realism by Robert Salvador, Ellis enjoys his virulent racism. Proudly using the N-word, he seems highly unlikely to find common ground with a black champion of integration.
His antagonist, Ann Atwater (Celia Aloma, excellent once she relaxes), is as bitter as Ellis and as firmly locked into her righteous anger. A black woman activist in a Deep South city with a long history of Jim Crow, she takes out her frustrations on white racists like Ellis with a quick tongue and wicked sense of humour.
Into this cauldron steps Bill Riddick (Antony Santiago), a black community organizer sent to Durham to address the deep-seated problem of its segregated schools. He sets up a “charrette” where people with polar positions get to thrash out their opinions. To Ellis he’s just another uppity black troublemaker. Surprisingly, Atwater resents his presence, too.
Rebecca deBoer stars in Best of Enemies, which runs until March 21 at the Pacific Theatre. Photo: Emily Cooper.
With implacable optimism Riddick keeps trying to nudge them from their set positions to find common ground. He eventually does, each gradually giving a little, recognizing the need to change things for the sake of their kids and concluding that economics is more important than race in oppressing blacks and poor whites. As their resistance withers, they slowly acknowledge their common humanity with the help of Ellis’ unhappy wife, Mary (Rebecca deBoer).
A true story this may be, but the play still needs to make us believe the unlikely conversion of the central characters, especially Ellis. We get suggestions why he agrees to co-chair the charrette with Atwater, why he listens to a black choir, why he’s willing to be ostracized by his fellow Klansmen. But none really accounts for his radical changes despite Salvador’s marvellous performance.
St. Germain takes too many shortcuts in telling the story. There are too many one-way phone calls, too many scenes where offstage groups are represented by designer Rick Colhoun’s sound cues. One key catalyst, Ellis’ handicapped child, we never see. And Mary is seriously underwritten, more a device than a character.
Aloma and Salvador make the last scene between Atwater and Ellis quietly moving. But the play hasn’t fully earned the emotional satisfaction we are meant to get from its final image.