The first half of the play is realistic; the second, surrealistic. The protagonist in each half—make that in each scene—differs from the last. That’s just two instances of Geraldine Inoa’s unique, far-out approach to writing a play—in this case Scraps, now in a West Coast premiere at the Matrix Theater, which has become a kind of showcase for black plays which were successful in New York (such as The Mountaintop). Scraps deals with race and rage in the USA. Set on a grimy street in Bedford-Stuyvesant (remarkable design by John Iacovelli) where a white cop recently shot and killed Forest, an innocent black kid, the play looks at the survivors of that traumatic event. Jean-Baptiste Delacroix (Tyrin Niles) is the first person we meet; seated on tenement stoop, he raps about violence to blacks, gentrification, and his alienation from white society in a cascade of pungent and profane language. Jean-Baptiste then turns his anger on Calvin (Ahkei Togun), a neighborhood kid on an upwardly mobile arc in life. Just back from a student-exchange stay in London, he takes a lot of verbal abuse from Jean-Baptiste, who sees him as a sell-out, a white Negro. Aisha (Denise Yolen), Forest’s widow, also has it in for poor Calvin, who can’t seem to please anyone in the ‘hood. Aisha, who has a five-year-old by Forest, is in a rage of her own over his death—and over her plight in life as a badly-paid cashier at Key Foods. Another, even-angrier local is Adriana (Ashlee Olivia), Aisha’s younger sister, who also comes in for some scorn because she has enrolled at NYU). Adriana is the most complex character in the play, a firebrand with a long list of grievances against society—grievances that she ultimately and tragically turns against herself. The jump into surrealism (and melodrama) is headed by Sebastian, Aisha and Forest’s now eight-year old son (the time has jumped from 2014 to 2017). With Iacovelli’s realistic set dissolving into a hellish landscape, Sebastian (played by a hulking adult, Damon Rutledge) seeks to enact revenge for his father’s death by hunting down and torturing the cop who killed him (Stan Mayer, in a pig mask). The blood-letting takes place in what suddenly resembles a TV game-show setting. The parody included gender and queer references, most of which were lost on me because of they way they were delivered, in a thunder-storm of shouting, wailing and cheering. If this review makes Scraps sound like a complete mess, I have done the play a disservice. The playwright paints a powerful and true portrait of what it’s like for black people to live in a world of terror and fear—it’s just unfortunate that she obscures the portrait by throwing too much paint at it. Aside from some problems with diction, the cast perform well and give all they could to this gutsy but flawed theatrical experiment.
