The map on the wall of the train car, the empty seats, and the advertisements for Burma-Shave indicate that we are in New York City on an early evening during the mid-20th century for the first in this double bill of plays. Amiri Baraka's career-making 1964 one-act, Dutchman, recounts how black corporate Clay is lured by white free-spirit Lula's seductive banter into sharing an erotic fantasy that turns suddenly ugly following the entrance of other passengers. The chronological markers in Darren Canady's "response," titled TRANSit,—PSAs for condoms and restroom orientation—locate us in the immediate present, where African-American trans woman Veronica and effete blue-eyed Luke find their friendship tested after their late-night commute is interrupted by dancer/hustler Lalo, whose swagger triggers a burst of residual machismo. One encounter ends in murder, the other in what we hope is merely a pants-wetting scare. In 1992, Rodney King pleaded to angry mobs, "Please, can't we just get along?" Apparently we can't, not as long as individuals dissatisfied with their own lives take comfort in bullying those less fortunate. Baraka rants against the humiliation inflicted on the perceived descendants of slaves by a society bent on ascertaining that even double-degreed Village poet/authors (like himself) will never rest easy, but he offers no remedy for this injustice. More than fifty years later, Canady reaffirm this gloomy dispatch but expands the range of its context. No one can deny the manifestation of hostile prejudice today, but are we then to conclude from the experience of our three disenfranchised waifs that our nation's long-extended promise of re-invention is a myth and that gender-linked ancestral imperatives will always triumph? This disappointing prospect doesn't rule out thrilling theater forged from its muddy logic. Under Chuck Smith's savvy direction, Michael Pogue and Amanda Drinkall resist the temptation to rush the risky—and ultimately fatal—head games parsed by Clay and Lula, rendering all the more abrupt the latter's unexplained descent into vilification. Manny Buckley and Edgar Miguel Sanchez likewise take the leisurely route in generating an atmosphere of testosterone-fueled danger, while Jake Szczepaniak renders Luke's pacifism ambivalent, but never malicious. This approach ensures that by the time physical violence breaks out, the emotional tension has escalated to a level designed to leave us so numb with shock that we can almost overlook the irony of our conspicuously racial/sexual/economically diverse audience bearing witness, together, in the Greenhouse's smallest studio, to the assertion that multicultural harmony is unachievable.
