Marys Seacole, LCT Online, 4 July 2021 ***

THEATRE - ONLINE

Written by  Jackie Sibblies Drury

Part of LCT Steinberg New Works Program

Recorded at Claire Tow Theatre, Streamed by Lincoln Center Theater until 4 July 2021

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Stars: ***

 This short review is only published on this blog. KH

Quincy Tyler Bernstine as Marys Seacole

 

Jackie Sibblies Drury’s play, Marys Seacole, explores the life of Jamaican nurse, Marys Seacole, and her modern counterparts, in an episodic journey that visits 19^th century Jamaica and Crimea, and 21^st century America.

 

In Lileana Blain-Cruz's production of Sibblies' play, Marys, played compellingly by Quincy Tyler Bernstine, transports us to different times or locations by narrating parts of her story in monologues. Some of this interpolated narration has too much explication or is simply too long.

 

The first time shifts delivers Marys from Jamaica in 1850s, to present-day America and the action moves to a modern nursing home where an earnest, white woman visits her ailing, verbally unresponsive mother.

 

We meet other women of Jamaican background as modern nurses, mothers in a playground and nurses on the Crimean battlefield.

 

In a playground, an over-enthusiastic, young, white mother tries to engage two Jamaican women in conversation, bursts into tears from hysterical fatigue, then keeps yapping. However, the women are still resistant and silently exasperated by her cloying, stereotyping of Jamaica – a view based on her expensive holidays.

 

Marys, in her carious depictions, has a patron and is patronised, is treated as a servant and as a lesser person than her white counterparts. This racism is most obvious in Florence Nightingale’s refusal to employ Marys as a battlefield nurse because she is Jamaican – so Marys starts her own nursing team.

 

This is an interesting play that needs further development and dramaturgical work on the script. The production has some electric moments but, in its final scenes, slips into chaos and confusion that is not just a representation of Marys’s racing and confused thoughts, memories and experiences. (Some of these issues may have been exacerbated by viewing it online.)

 

Despite its theatrical weaknesses,  Marys Seacole certainly challenges stereotypes and raises compelling issues about race and equality.

 

By Kate Herbert

 

Directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz

Cast features:

Quincy Tyler Bernstine as Marys Seacole

Gabby Beans as Mamie

Marceline Hugot as Merry

Karen Kandel as Duppy Mary

Ismenia Mendes as Miriam

Lucy Taylor as May.