2 Oakland daughters grapple with painful past
Published 4:41 pm, Sunday, June 30, 2013
In a Daughter's Eyes: Drama. By A. Zell Williams. Directed by Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe. Through July 14. Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St., San Francisco. 90 minutes. $15. (415) 641-7657. www.brava.org.
The sins of the fathers are visited on their daughters in a big way in A. Zell Williams' "In a Daughter's Eyes." Not that either daughter blames her dad. Fervent filial loyalty stokes the fierce tensions in the provocative but somewhat formulaic West Coast premiere that opened Saturday at Brava Theater Center.
Though first performed in Philadelphia, "Daughter" is very much a play about local Black Panther history and current tensions between Oakland's police and its African American communities. Set in West Oakland, it's a series of meetings-cum-showdowns between the daughter of a Panther leader, long on death row for the murder of an Oakland cop in the old days, and that officer's daughter.
The high quality of Britney Frazier and Lisa Anne Porter's performances provides welcome evidence of Brava's continued revival as a performance center - as well as the revival of co-producer Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe's Black Artists Contemporary Cultural Experience. Under Cooper-Anifowoshe's direction, Frazier and Porter inhabit the cagey negotiations, revelations and misdirections of Williams' dialogue so fully that we remain engaged through some contrived plot developments.
Frazier's Rehema Abu-Salaam is a smart, driven, well-educated (Stanford, Harvard) lawyer with a poised surface that only partly conceals a quick temper and true-believer zeal to prove her father's innocence. Porter's more open, confused Katherine Tinney, a nurse, is torn between helping Rehema - an order to get potentially exonerating DNA tests is involved - and the vehement opposition of her brother, who's followed his late father on the Oakland police force.
The dialogue keeps shifting gears between being cooperative, manipulative and confrontational, usually with convincing naturalness but at times a little too mechanically. Porter and Frazier are particularly effective not only in keeping each woman true to her background and primary concerns but also in revealing moments of genuine concern for each other - and the cost of feeling rebuffed.
Williams' script, a National New Play Network prizewinner, is particularly impressive in its use of language - the different ways in which both women try to make connections and avoid pitfalls. Analogies are grasped at and deployed, some effectively, others obviously illogical or unconsciously revealing. Expletives are wielded, repented and reveled in. Prejudices are glimpsed and skirted; Porter's stiffening at a joke about a piggy bank is a nice touch.
But Williams' promising two-hander suffers from certain movie-of-the-week melodramatic touches that can make the play seem like a generic bid for topical relevance. By its end, "Daughter" may strike you as a case of two very interestingly drawn characters still in search of a more fully realized plot.