‘Stick Fly’ Proves Its Sticking Power at the Old Barn

After they break out on Broadway, some plays only seem to become more relevant, profound and mature — if they manage to stick around. That was my experience in attending the opening night of Lydia R. Diamond’s Stick Fly at Theatre Charlotte, which runs through June 1 at the Queens Road Barn, my third go-round with the dramedy since I first saw the original production at the Cort Theatre in early 2012.

Times were different then. Midway through the Obama presidency, it seemed like serious Black playwrights could exhale. In those hallelujah days, it was no longer obligatory to dwell on the deprivations and sufferings of your race. Before the Orange One and George Floyd, it seemed like it might be better to discard the downtrodden in the rearview mirror and examine how middle- and upper-class African Americans view each other through the lenses of color and status. Today.

Or to look at Diamond’s breakthrough more cynically, maybe it was long past time for us to start seeing Black folk onstage who more closely resembled those that we had seen for decades onscreen and densely populating TV sitcoms, police procedurals and hospital melodramas — that vanilla treatment with an extra layer or three of depth. I’m admittedly guilty of seeing Stick Fly in that light back then and when it first appeared in the Queen City at Actor’s Theatre in 2015.

Compounding the kinship of Diamond’s work to TV are the artful contrivances of her plots, the compactness of her character development and the breezy naturalness of her dialogue, both in casual conversation and in heated confrontations. There’s no mistaking: These are brainy people. Even the white girl has wit and understanding.

So my thanks to director Sidney Horton for slackening the pace vis-à-vis the two previous productions I had seen. After all, most of the people arriving at this ancient Martha’s Vineyard mansion have packed their suitcases for an extended vacation at the LeVays’ summer home. Relaxation needs to be a key part of the rhythm if we’re to penetrate beyond the script’s slickness. Horton lets it breathe.

He also allows Germôna Sharp to be considerably less adorable and more irritating than any Taylor Scott I’ve experienced before — irritating enough for her last line to earn a guffaw. Daughter of a renowned historian, Taylor ought to fit in effortlessly on the site of the first land at the Vineyard ever deeded to an African American. Since she is an etymologist, the island’s insects ought to hold a special charm.

But she’s the daughter of the esteemed James Bradley Scott’s first marriage, shunned by him afterwards, and not mentioned by name in his obituary. So when her fiancé, Spoon LeVay brings her home to formally introduce her to his parents, she feels like she needs to impress. So she’s noticeably effortful, and the more she tries, the more déclassé she comes off.

Spoon’s formidable father, Dr. Joseph LeVay, certainly makes an imposing entrance, a brilliant Diamond contrivance. After a softball Trivial Pursuit question about Pavlov lobbed at Spoon, the neurosurgeon’s other son, Flip, must name the South Vietnamese president assassinated in 1963. 

At the precise moment that Flip is complaining about this gross inequality, Dad enters and authoritatively gives the answer, casually adding that he met President Ngô Đình Diệm’s brother in ’72.

There are other fine touches in the ensuing conversation, some overt and some subtle. Dad assumes that Taylor is Flip’s girlfriend, so Taylor is instantly alarmed, concluding that Spoon hasn’t told his father about her, one of many gauche and insecure moments for Taylor. Of course, Spoon does introduce Taylor, and Dad, recovering from his confusion, remembers that she is the daughter of a great man, a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Rather than join in on Joseph’s hosannahs to her revered dad, Taylor tips off her resentments by suggesting that the group get back to their game, the second time Diamond turns Trivial Pursuit into a sharp storytelling tool. 

Subtler still, Dr. Joe tries (twice) to offer up a little-known factoid about President Diệm. That he never gets a chance speaks to the younger generation’s indifference to past history and the neurosurgeon’s urbane forbearance. When Taylor has something to say, you can bet it gets said.

Perhaps subtlest of all is Spoon’s recognition that Taylor deserves an intro. This is not what happens earlier in the play, when the couple encounters Cheryl in the kitchen, pinch-hitting for her ailing mother as family cook and housekeeper. Younger than the couple or the brothers — all of the LeVays marvel at how she has grown — Cheryl is not a lightweight, currently pondering the choice of any Ivy League school she wishes to attend or NYU.

But she does not merit an intro from Spoon, which explains Taylor’s first faux pas: calling Cheryl the maid. Retribution will come later with the arrival of Flip’s “Italian” girlfriend, Kimber, who immediately mistakes Taylor for Cheryl. So eager to help, please and make amends to Cheryl, once again Taylor has betrayed her insecurities by answering the front door, subbing for Cheryl and short-circuiting the household norm.

To her credit, Kimber doesn’t actually call Taylor a maid — merely congratulating her on her recent graduation by mistake. Besides her lack of nervousness, Kimber’s admirable savoir faire makes Taylor hate her all the more. Blithely, she’ll quash the notion of being Italian — “pure WASP” — proving how carefree and drunk she is, never doubting she belongs anywhere.

Taylor will explode at the very idea that someone who studies and works with inner-city youth would question her reactions, as a “raisin in the oatmeal” at a mostly white school, to a curriculum her teacher devised and a racist Utopia her more privileged classmates imagined. 

It doesn’t help that Cheryl, having just graduated from a school with similar demographics, is siding with Kimber. Or that Spoon doesn’t speak up for her because, as he discreetly points out afterwards, Taylor knows even less about the inner city than Kimber.

Sharp’s most difficult moment comes at the peak of her tirade when, out of control, Taylor shocks herself. Sharp handles that beautifully — maybe the best “Did I say that out loud?” take I’ve ever seen.

Here is one of those key spots where Horton lets the script breathe and seep in with us as Taylor realizes that she has humiliated herself and, yet again, needs to make amends. Although Rachel Dawson doesn’t quite fulfill the age gap Diamond prescribes, it’s clear from her cooler, sunnier demeanor that Kimber is the most mature woman in the room and understands Taylor better than she understands herself.

Yet Dawson’s tongue can be sharp; too bad it’s not consistently audible at the Queens Road Barn, even for those seated in Row C.

Sadly enough, the same applies to Chloe Shade as Cheryl, the role that earned a Tony Award nomination for Condola Rashad. While Taylor flounders or awkwardly sucks the air out of the room, Cheryl is Diamond’s raisin in the sun, another dream deferred — not by white folk, as in the bygone days of Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry, but for 18 years by an absent dad.

We get hints of what is to come in Act 1 when Keith Logan, in a magisterial performance as Dad, deflects all importunities relayed by Cheryl from her terminally ill mom and emphatically refuses to accept any phone calls from his wife while hosting his guests. There is no good reason for Cheryl to raise her voice in Act 1, so Shade underplays her before intermission. At the start of Act 2, Cheryl is already weeping when she enters the kitchen, talking to Mom on her cell.

Thankfully, Shade turns up the volume in receiving this shocking new revelation, lifting all of Act 2 into a far finer experience than what preceded. Her climactic explosion has a feminist force of near-manifesto dimensions, yet Shade connects it believably with the demure domestic who lifted the sheets off the furniture when we first saw her.

Until then, Diamond layers on another imminent explosion to distract us from Cheryl’s impending eruption when we quickly learn that Flip and Taylor had a brief fling during their Harvard days. Except it wasn’t a fling from Taylor’s point of view. Spoon doesn’t know, Taylor didn’t realize Flip and Spoon were brothers, and Flip would rather forget about it.

So Jonathan Caldwell gets to be the first LeVay exposed as a cad, playing it to the playboy hilt, a chip off the old block, his dad. Naturally enough, he’s a plastic surgeon, so he’s often over-the-top, yet capable of kindness and amorous playfulness.

Only Sha’Heed J. Brooks as Spoon strikes us as relatively unblemished amid the cavalier arrogance of his kin. Like Taylor, he’s a bit of a drifter in terms of career paths, earning degrees in law, business and sociology before “finding himself” as an author, soon to publish his first novel. 

Yeah, there’s a cliché or two to get past in the ongoing discord between a questing artistic son and his pragmatic professional dad.

Read more: ‘…what the end will be’ Is Damningly Futuristic

Brooks, though often as underpowered as Dawson and Shade, convinces us of Spoon’s neediness and honesty while keeping his sense of self and artistic fire aglow. 

Even when Logan is at his most avuncular as Dad, in a fine moonlit porch scene where we watch him mentoring Taylor, the taint of his impatience with her 31-year-old sweetheart lingers in the air.

A good Black man is hard to find, Diamond seems to tell us — and he’s as undervalued as good Black women when you do.