~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A-A-America!

by Edward Bond
review by Robert Avila in the San Francisco Bay Guardian (April 2, 2003)

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Rather than leading away from such complications, playwright Edward Bond's take on American racism explores its totalitarian implications, in which capitulation to a system based on violence, racism, and xenophobia jeopardizes the liberty of all. Back in 1976, England's brilliant left-wing dramatist and longtime enfant terrible penned a pair of excoriating one-act comedies under the title A-A-America! If Bond's bicentennial gift to the United States is only now being unwrapped in Crowded Fire's daring American premiere, it hasn't lost any of its freshness.

 

Grandma Faust, a parody of a Southern folktale, refashions Uncle Sam (Michael Brusasco) as a barefoot bumpkin who conspires with the Devil, in the gnarled shape of Sam's invalid granny (Linda Jones), to steal the soul of a simple black man named Paul (Algin Ford), who naturally turns out to be not as simple as they imagined. The broad humor here competes intentionally (though not always successfully) with the violence of the theme, brought out in the casually sadistic language as well as the fanciful premise, drawn from the too-real trade in black bodies, that has two identical Southern belles (Sara Betts and Michele Leavy) vying for the chance to bake Paul into a pie.

 

The slightly more realistic The Swing makes for a surer second act. Paul returns as a servant to Mrs. Kroll (Jones), a widow performing leg shows for the coarse company of a Western boomtown, and her bookish and willful but emotionally fragile daughter Greta (Cassie Beck). Paul tells us that we are being given the more or less factual account of a lynching that took place in a public theater in Livermore, Kentucky, in 1911: "If there's gonna be a lynchin', you'll sit more comfortable if you know exactly what seat history's sat you in." But nothing prepares us for the subtle relationships and ironies that lace the journey. The limber work of director Christine Young and her fine cast make these details instantly familiar and authentic.

 

In the end a man sits tied to a swing, accused of rape and robbery. Suddenly the play we are watching is the patriotic entertainment of a particular day in 1911, in which the theater management invites us, the audience, to open fire at the man in order of ticket price, until he's riddled with more than a hundred bullets. In one deft gesture Bond offers a moment of complicity in the collision (and collusion) of past and present. This is lynching as spectacle, the theater of violence that consumed thousands of lives in the Jim Crow era, the vast majority of them African American.

 

Racism and outlaw justice are too much with us today to afford forgetting the harrowing history of lynching in this country. But Bond's inspired provocations do more than dredge up the past. There's a larger undercurrent of violence, of moral and social chaos, from which no one ultimately escapes. Far from a pedantic history lesson, Crowded Fire's smart and committed production demands an accounting of social responsibility. "Art," Bond says, "always concerns itself with the cruelty of a particular time."

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