Stick Fly

One of the characters in Lydia Diamond's play, which opens the season at Princeton's McCarter Theater, is an entomologist, and she explains how a common house fly moves so fast that scientists need to glue it to a stick to get a good look at how its' wings move. This is an apt metaphor for this play, because we as the audience are in the role of observing scientists, watching a group of six people, some family and some strangers, interact in one weekend, their lives changing entirely.

Stick Fly is set on Martha's Vineyard, which has a long history of being a vacation spot for upper-class African-Americans. The summer home of the LeVay family is the set. The Levays are overachievers. The patriarch is a neurosurgeon, one son is a plastic surgeon, the other has many post-graduate degrees, but has disappointed his father because he has turned to writing fiction. This son, Kent, brings his fiancee home to meet the folks for the first time. She is Taylor, the entomologist. Kent met her at the funeral of her father, who was a groundbreaking cultural anthropologist, although she was estranged from him and hardly knew him. She's nervous about meeting his family, especially since she's from the middle-class and has feelings of inadequacy.

The other brother, Flip, the plastic surgeon, is also bringing home a new girlfriend. She's Kimber, described as "melanin-challenged," i.e., white. She's an African-American studies grad, a do-gooder with white liberal guilt, who is constantly accused of dating a black man simply to be shocking. Also in the house is Cheryl, the daughter of the family's long-time maid, who has just graduated high school and is filling in for her sick mother. The last character to arrive is the father, who is mysteriously without his wife.

The plot unfolds and characters have some secrets that will be revealed over the course of the evening. Some of them are a bit too coincidental and another is right out of General Hospital, but Diamond sells it by virtue of the skill of her dialogue. I was particularly rapt during a scene in which Taylor tells off Kimber. It's a great awkward moment that happens in families all the time, and was really authentic.

The ensemble cast is good, directed by Shirley Jo Finney. At times I found Michole Briana White, who plays Taylor, a little grating. She's so nervous and hopped up, bouncing around the set like the flies she studies, and it was a little wearisome. Julia Pace Mitchell, who played Cheryl, embodied the youthful surliness of her character perfectly, though at times the script had her change attitudes on a dime.

In one of the collateral brochures, McCarter Artistic Director Emily Mann says one of the reasons she was drawn to the play was because the upper-class Black experience is rarely seen on stage. That may be true, but it has been seen by millions on television, in such sit-coms as The Cosby Show and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Compared to Stick Fly, though, those shows are idealized fantasies. This play tackles some ambitious issues: race, gender and class. While at times the play slogs through academic double-speak, at least it didn't treat these issues in a facile manner. Stick Play is quality entertainment and quite thought-provoking.