Fucking A

The reviews are in.

RAKE MAGAZINE’s SECRET OF THE DAY

I heart Frank Theatre: Frank opens a heady show with a naughty name

Frank Theatre is one of Minnesota’s last theater troupes to continue producing thoughtful, edgy plays well into the post-9-11 slumber. Last year’s Frank production of The Cradle Will Rock was widely regarded as the best thing that happened in local theater all year long. Frank staged the show on a makeshift stage in the dilapidated Sears Building on Lake St., which served as a yummy backdrop for the show?s depression-era, working class folk-opera antics. In a continued effort to produce deliciously smart, over-the-top shows that never shy from political themes, Frank is opening The A Play (a print-friendly euphemism for the show’s real name), playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’ answer to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. And Frank continues to seek out non-traditional venues. A plays in the A Mill Complex, an old machine shop near St. Anthony Main. 300 2nd St. S.E., Minneapolis; Opening tonight, through Nov. 14; 612-724 3760; www.franktheatre.org

Theater review: A play too easy to view as artifice
Graydon Royce, Star Tribune, www.startribune.com, October 26, 2004

“At its heart, theatrical tragedy is personal. “Oedipus” bears witness to the gods’ caprice, but its real power lies in the destruction of a human being.

“Suzan-Lori Parks, the most daring playwright working today, articulates that notion in some plays, such as “Topdog/Underdog” that mix the epic and mundane in perfect measure to produce a devastating kick. In others, though, the formula falls out of balance and the result is merely brilliant stagecraft.

“Such is the case with Parks’ “A” play, which in full disclosure contains an “F” word preceding the “A.” Produced by Frank Theatre in the abandoned Pillsbury “A” mill in southeast Minneapolis, the piece wraps Brechtian playfulness and surreal futurism around a personal struggle. It’s dazzling and rich, but too easy to view as artifice, which keeps the agony of tragedy at arm’s length.

“Borrowing from Nathaniel Hawthorne, the play’s central character is branded with an “A” just above her heart. It indicates that Hester Smith is an abortionist in a world reeking of “1984” statism and fantasy. Women drop into a foreign tongue when talking about private parts, bounty hunters comb the landscape looking for escaped prisoners, a cowed underclass exists in resentment.

“Hester longs for her son’s return from prison — or even the chance to picnic with him. Her ally, the prostitute Mary Canary, helps out with gold coins gotten through her liaison with a pompous mayor. Through twists and turns, the story leads to a mother-son reunion that turns horrific.

“Maybe it’s too much plot. Maybe it’s Parks’ obvious homage to Brecht in short scenes, raw songs and a faux burlesque style. Maybe it’s a sense that the play never feels comfortable taking itself seriously — despite evoking serious issues. Maybe it’s because the relationships never shiver with high stakes. Whatever, the play is strangely cool and distant.

“Director Wendy Knox’s production, straddling the line between mythic epic and real life, doesn’t solve this conundrum. Sha Cage ignites Hester with an angry portrayal, harshly spoken in a stentorian bearing. She and Knox, however, have not shaded this volatile character with a visible capacity for manipulation and vulnerability. Maria Asp is deliciously complex as Canary Mary and Gregory Stewart Smith has the finest comic moment as a butcher wooing Hester. Dana Munson, Christiana Clark and Ann Kim merit mention.

“Technically, Frank has converted a nontraditional space into a dynamic theater laboratory. John Bueche’s sprawling shantytown uses three different levels to denote class and distance. Michael Kittel’s lights hit the right mood and Kathy Kohl’s costuming is spot on.

“There is a lot to chew on here, but Parks’ script and Frank’s production never plunges the dagger that might cleave our hearts.

REVIEW: Red-Letter Play: An intense area premiere of Suzan-Lori Parks’s ‘Fucking A’
by Quinton Skinner City Pages, Issue #1247, Vol. 25  www.citypages.com

“Frank Theatre’s area premiere of Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks’s Fucking A spurns a standard theater’s creature comforts in favor of the concrete floor of a machine shop in the old Pillsbury mill complex. It’s a fittingly austere space for director Wendy Knox’s unflinching take on a difficult, wrenching work that bores into the primal heart beneath society’s veneer: power, greed, reproduction, and cruelty.

“John Bueche’s set lends a visual jolt. Placed in the back of the industrial shop, it’s all corrugated metal, rundown appliances, and assorted found objects defining stylized domestic squalor (there are also small mini-sets installed at various vertical levels, making use of the space’s high ceiling). Said squalor belongs to Hester Smith (Sh? Cage), whose chest has been branded with a scarlet “A.” In Hawthorne’s colonial America, the letter stood for adultery. In Parks’s world, it stands for “abortionist,” and, as we are reminded time and again, the wound continues to weep and reek.

“The action takes place in a “small town in a small country in the middle of nowhere,” a land that features a repressive police state and an oppressive bureaucracy. The Mayor rules, more people are in jail than out, and escaped prisoners are hunted down and tortured to death by vigilantes. Hester pines for her son, who was arrested on trumped-up charges and taken from her when he was a boy. Thirty years have passed, and she’s been making payments into the “Freedom Fund” to buy his release. All that stands in her way are sinister clerks, man-hunting gangs, and her own tragic inability to recognize the changes that time and injustice have wrought on the grown-up Boy Smith (Ron Collier, sly and furtive.)

“Cage’s task is no easy one: The production hinges on her ability to convey Hester’s pariah status while giving the character the guileless naivet? to propel her through the action and stave off the cynical heartlessness all around her. Cage succeeds, with a sweet, open expression that quickly shifts with flashes of anger, clouds of shame, and crushingly palpable humility. She also plays well off Maria Asp’s Canary Mary, the Mayor’s kept woman, with the two evincing some of the only interpersonal warmth onstage all evening (discounting Emil Herrera’s amusingly pompous and vacuous Mayor, who radiates enough self-love to heat the building).

“An unexpected love interest materializes in the form of the Butcher (Gregory Stewart Smith); Smith earnestly plays the blood-spattered Butcher with an uncomplicated goodness that hits the perfect note once Cage turns steely and angry in the second act. Smith has good comedic instincts, notably in his solo vocal number about the virtues of marrying a “meat man.” More than once he keeps matters from becoming too ponderous, especially during a recital of crimes his daughter committed, long and surreal and made deeply funny by Smith’s air of consternated frustration.

“Fucking A nods at Greek tragedy and Brechtian musicality; the latter aspect works only sporadically due to the cumbersomely wordy tunes and the limited vocal ability of some cast members (Michael Croswell’s bluesy musical accompaniment is consistently solid). The tragedy requires a Hester who denies reality in front of her eyes, and who is convincing doing it. Parks pulls it off, and the ending is both appropriate and appallingly shocking.

“This is an evening that jars and grates, entertains, amuses, and generally slaps you around. Suzan-Lori Parks, for her part, is flirting shamelessly with greatness. Fucking A creates a moral Nowhere Zone, with gold coins and abortions vying for psychological space with gold lame and scar tissue. It’s a world in which very bad things happen for no reason at all. Fucking A, indeed.

REVIEW: F**king ‘A’ messily impressive
BY DOMINIC P. PAPATOLA
Pioneer Press October 24, 2004 www.twincities.com

“You can deconstruct Suzan-Lori Parks’ “F**king A” all sorts of ways. It’s a riff on Hawthorne, with Hester’s scarlet “A” standing for “abortionist” instead of “adulteress.” It’s a Brechtian Follies, self-conscious of its own theatrical nature, with actors sometimes speaking in a made-up language or occasionally stepping forward to sing about their characters. It’s a contemporary tragedy along the lines of “Medea,” with archetypical characters smacked with the kiss of doom.

“Any way you slice it, though, this is a play chock-filled with ideas and having a tremendous amount going on within its two hours and 15 minutes. It’s a fearless, ambitious and flawed script – in short, just the kind of tantalizingly messy endeavor that Wendy Knox’s Frank Theatre loves to do.

“Is it an impressive effort? Absolutely. Frank has converted another unlikely space– this time an abandoned machine shop on the Mississippi riverfront ? into a grimly appropriate performance venue. John Bueche uses junk found in the space and the detritus from past Frank shows to build an evocatively dilapidated slum of a set. Lighting designer Michael Kittel bolts instruments to girders and has uses hand-operated lights to give the show a rough, improvisatory feel.

“Knox doesn’t find a way to work the huge orange crane looming overhead into the show (and you know she must have been itching to), but uses the levels and the fenced-in industrial threat of the space effectively, creating a mood that’s at once expansive and claustrophobic.

“And she’s assembled a solid corps of actors, led by the physically petite, emotionally mighty Sha Cage as Hester; the unabashed Maria Asp as her prostitute friend; the elegantly befuddled Gregory Stewart Smith as Hester’s would-be suitor; and the supremely unctuous Emil Herrera as a mayor-for-life eager to produce an heir to his throne.

“Does it gel? Not quite–and I’m not sure that’s even possible. Parks jammed this play with questions about human choice and social class, theatrical embellishments like the made-up language and the songs and parallel situations stretching to infinity.

“The Frank production feels not so much staged as wrangled ? its disparate elements goaded into moving, generally and not always compliantly, in the same direction. For all the emotional and physical viscera in the play, there’s a certain bloodlessness in the way it comes off the stage.

“But perhaps that’s the best that can be done with “F**king A.” It’s an obstinate piece of theater that stubbornly insists on being what it is, instead of what you might want it to be.

CITY PAGES: The Year in Theater  They laughed. They cried. They used the “F” word. They wore funny wigs… and we were there
by Quinton Skinner, City Pages, www.citypages.com

“The Ten Best (In Alphabetical Order)
Fucking A:  Frank Theatre

“Frank Theatre continued its peripatetic ways by staging Suzan-Lori Parks’s transgressive bombshell on the concrete floor of an old machine shop, an aptly austere locale for this harsh work preoccupied with sex, death, power, and warped injustice. Sh? Cage delivered a raw and soulful turn as Hester, branded with a scarlet letter “A” for abortionist. Gregory Stewart Smith played her love interest with a guileless goodness that stood out all the more once a net of evil was pulled tight around Hester’s search for her imprisoned son. Director Wendy Knox guided the work to a perfect tone, creating a world both futuristic (police state bureaucracy, a social order so broken down that vigilantes roam the woods) and old-timey (dilapidated shacks and roadhouses, a corrupt mayor running the town), all wrapped up in a blues score. Knox mentioned recently that audiences weren’t as large as the company had hoped, which, to be blunt, is a fucking shame.”