Danny Sapani plays a working-class, comic counterpart to his recent King Lear in Stephen Adly Guirgis’s jokey melodrama from 2014, about the serious troubles of a retired black New York cop.
Walter ‘Pops’ Washington is a roaringly fierce patriarch, fuelled by love, grievance and whiskey breakfasts. He’s mourning his wife and fighting for compensation from the NYPD after he was shot and rendered impotent eight years before by a younger, white officer. His rent-controlled apartment on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive is a precarious haven for his son Junior’s dodgy associates.
There’s a lot to chew on and a lot to enjoy here, but Guirgis’s trademark use of heightened and racially-charged street language – he won the Evening Standard Best Play Award for The Motherf***er with the Hat in 2015 – feels jarring after the Black Lives Matter protests. His tendency to spring surprise plot points and jokes is manipulative. The script’s ostensibly savage wit also hides a mawkish redemption arc.
Michael Longhurst’s energetic production is marred by a fussy set by Max Jones of living room, bedroom and graffitied streetscape, through which the characters make a slow progress. Sapani and others fluffed some lines in the first half on opening night but the mix of rude, crude vigour and sentiment got the show over the line.
Like Tarantino characters, we witness 40 minutes of Pops sparring and grousing about nothing in particular with Junior (Martins Imhangbe), Junior’s dimwit maybe-sex worker girlfriend Lulu (Tiffany Gray in her stage debut) and his ex-con friend Oswaldo (Sebastian Orozco), before the shooting and legal case are even mentioned. The revelation that Pops’s wife Dolores died at Christmas belatedly explains the mouldering, decorated pine in the corner.
Guirgis lets his characters show themselves as they hope to be seen, then reveals their flaws. Pops was “not the best, not the worst” husband, father or cop. The apparently racist shooting is not as clear cut as he’d like to make it; his marriage and his moral conduct were not ideal. His white former police partner and surrogate daughter Audrey (Judith Roddy) isn’t as loyal as she seems. Nor is Oswaldo, as we witness in a moment that’s outrageous, funny and shocking.
In an odd, underdeveloped way I think the play is about the persistence of faith despite disappointment: in professional fellowships, in family, in religion. Ayesha Antoine’s Church Lady represents the latter, and like Gray she is very funny in a role that is basically that of a highly sexualized liar. With Daniel Lapaine playing Audrey’s slimy cop fiancé Dave, I’d say Guirgis’s two-faced, two dimensional supporting characters get better actors than they deserve.
This is a tricksy, rigged piece of drama, with a distended denouement. It's still headily enjoyable, though, to see a show that chucks race, politics, family, the existence of God and the possibility of raising the dead (if you see it, you’ll get it) into the mix with such gleeful abandon. And Sapani has great, charismatic fun with the OTT character of Pops.
Hampstead Theatre, to June 15; hampsteadtheatre.com
