Back Back Back: Un-enhanced Performance with Too Many Errors

Audience Adds New Wrinkle to Raisin in the Sun

Comments (0) By Elaine Liner Thursday, Mar 26 2009

In this landmark work, the first play by a black woman ever to reach Broadway, scenes get as emotionally raw as in anything by Eugene O'Neill. But at the performance reviewed, the audience kept laughing in places where they shouldn't. Not nervous tittering—long, sustained, hooting guffaws. It threw off the actors' timing, particularly toward the end as the Youngers learn that Walter Lee has lost most of the money they're counting on.

The third act of Raisin is one of the most intensely sad, deeply poignant pieces of writing in American theater. The AART cast members, all wonderful, certainly aren't playing it for comedy. The only flaw in their performances is a tendency to deliver lines upstage in a whisper, rendering some words inaudible to all but the front rows.

Steroid use causes problems (and possibly extra limbs) for MLB pros played by Juan Javier Cardenas (right) and Will Fowler in DTC’s Back Back Back.

Details

Back Back Back continues through April 5 at Dallas Theater Center. Call 214-522-8499. A Raisin in the Sun continues through April 12 at Corner Theatre, DeSoto. Call 972-572-0998.

More About

What possibly could have prompted the inappropriate response to characters who feel confined by race and class? Walter is a chauffeur, tired of kowtowing to rich white people. Lena and Ruth are domestic workers. Beneatha experiments at finding her "identity" as a black woman, wearing Kinte cloth, letting her hair go natural, dating a Nigerian—radical behavior in the 1950s, but almost quaint today.

In 1959 the play pre-dated desegregation and the Voting Rights Act. The Youngers' hopes of home ownership are nearly derailed by a white neighborhood association fearful of what a white lawyer (Jack O'Donnell) calls "you people."

With a black family in the White House, all that does now seem long ago and far away. But even if the issues raised in A Raisin in the Sun are dated, that doesn't mean the play and the artists performing it don't deserve a little more respect.