THEATER REVIEW:
Two disparate plays share festival stage

By Marty Rosen
Special to The Courier-Journal

Juneteenth Legacy Theatre's yearly Juneteenth Jamboree is a mini festival focused on staged readings of new and developing plays by African Americans about the African-American experience. This year's festival, at the Victor Jory Theater at Actors Theatre of Louisville, has just completed its second weekend, and it continues next weekend.

Two quite different plays premiered on this weekend's bill.

"Mother's Day," by Illinois-based playwright and novelist J.E. Robinson, directed by Kathi Ellis, is a deft little comedy, bubbling over with laugh-out-loud one-liners about politics, cuisine, religion, love and hypocrisy.

The MacAlester family is a prominent old-line African-American Republican political family.

It's Mother's Day, and the family has assembled at its Illinois home. Alfred MacAlester (Ezzard Mosley) is a congressman eyeing the Senate. His flaw? He married Rose (Thea Browning) not for love, but for his career .

His true love is Genie Levin (Abigail Maupin Prior), a teacher with whom he ha s maintained a long sub-rosa relationship. His mother, Madelyn (Barbara Duncan) is a veteran campaigner, now retired from politics. Terry O'Neill (Sean Childress) is a political operative who ha s come to discuss Alfred's Senate chances, but secretly wants Madelyn to enter national politics.

Once the forces are gathered, they a re caught in a whirl of intrigue transacted in fast-paced dialogue by vividly drawn characters .

On Saturday night, director Ellis milked it for all it was worth, eliciting performances that captured both the fragility and brutal cynicism that inform the play.

Washington, D.C.-based playwright Alan Sharpe's "BrotherHOODS" was performed by members of D.C.'s African-American Collective Theatre and directed by the author. A gay-bashing incident at an African-American college is the impetus for "BrotherHOODS." And it's a play with promise. Sharpe can attain moving eloquence, and when he focuses on his story, he creates exquisite depictions of affection and exploitation that ring true . But those moments aren't enough to compensate for a penchant for repetitive preaching. Here, less, much less, could be so much more.