Arts

Where we all reside

by Rev. Irene  Monroe
Wednesday Sep 19, 2018

"Between Riverside and Crazy"

Stephen Adly Guirgis's 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning play "Between Riverside and Crazy" now adds to the SpeakEasy Stage Company's illustrious list of performances. With a packed audience at each performance "Between Riverside and Crazy" is a comic drama where Guirgis's characters are raw, complicated, vulnerable and very human. In other words, they are flawed in the ways we all are, and they are broken in places that are all too familiar.

Walter "Pops" Washington, the main protagonist, is a recently widowed tough-talking foul-mouthed elderly black ex-cop who's a Republican. To say he's ornery and a hot mess of contradictions is an understatement. With grit and fierce determination, Pops is battling with the New York Housing Authority to hold on to his spacious Manhattan's rent-controlled apartment on Riverside Drive on the Upper West Side. Also, he is feuding with the NYPD for a hefty settlement to compensate for injuries he sustained when a white cop shot him, rendering him disable and out of work.

Pops's epic battles, however, are further complicated by a motley cast of characters all living with him and can easily be labeled as social misfits: Junior, his son, who's recently released from prison; LuLu, Junior's girlfriend, who says she's pregnant; and, Oswaldo, Junior's friend, a homeless recovering addict. Their struggles to overcome their demons- internal and structural- are as epic as Pops's struggle for survival.

Guirgis's play can be troubling if viewed only topically. For example, critics have talked about Guirgis 's use of profanity, suggesting it might be gratuitous. However, I find Guirgis's profundity in his use of profanity. Guirgis who see it as part of his artistic expression explained his use of expletives in the following way: "In between the adjectives and modifiers that are colorful, [my characters] also say things that are pretty interesting, pretty human and oftentimes, pretty funny. "

Oswaldo explained to Pops why he altered his eating habits, is one such example. And the dialogue is comical.

"The Ring Dings and baloney and Fanta Grape, it turns out, that's what doctors and People Magazine call "Emotional Eating" on my part — on account of I only ate that shit because those foods made me feel "safe and taken care of" back when I was a kid who was never "safe or taken care of". But now, I'm a adult, right? So I don't gotta eat like that no more, and I can take care of myself by getting all fit and diesel like how I'm doing from eating these almonds and making other healthful choices like I been making. And so, I'm not trying to get all up in your business, but maybe that's also the reason you always be eating pie — because of, like, you got Emotionalisms -- ya know?"


Another example, Lulu, and Guirgis's use of stereotypes, that, in my opinion, all the characters are in some way. Lulu is the stereotype of a thick-accented Bronx Latinx scantily clad hoochie- looking sister who has no inclination to work and says she's pregnant. Lulu, however, delivers a line that disrupts the conventional assumptions about her stereotypical appearance.

"I may look how I look, but that don't mean I AM how I look."

Moreover, Guirgis's use of humor and profanity throughout the play serves both as a salve and catharsis when touching on thorny and still unresolved present-day social issues, like shooting and killing unarmed black men by predominately white officers, unjust and corrupt tactics of the NYPD, and the swift and rampant gentrification of minority-majority neighborhoods.

While many will think the inspiration for "Between Riverside and Crazy" is the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the chokehold death of Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York, the play is actually based on an incident that occurred twenty years earlier when a white officer mistook an undercover black cop for a criminal in 1994.

Unlike today, in 1994, it would have been a lot harder to convince the American public that police shootings and beatings of unarmed black men are rampant and reflect structural racism and implicit bias - albeit the Rodney King cop beating and the 1992 Los Angeles riot was just two years before this incident and aired internationally. Guirgis doesn't have to give his audience any commentary about police misconduct because we are now living in 2018, and the problem is front and center.

Pops's eight-year-old lawsuit against the NYPD does not end as he had hoped with a hefty settlement, and he doesn't get the justice he so rightly deserved given his thirty years of service on the force. However, he does keep his rent-controlled apartment, and he does gain new insight and energy about life that neither the apartment nor a financial settlement could give him. Pop calls it grace.

"Whatever the hell happened that night, it got me to here. And I didn't do nothing to deserve it. You gave that to me. You gave me Grace. "Always be free," right?"

Between Riverside and Crazy runs from Sept. 14 - October 13, at the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street in Boston's South End.