Off-Broadway Review— Jackie Sibblies Drury’s “Marys Seacole”

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 27 March 2019 19:50

Written by Kevin Filipski

Marys Seacole

Written by Jackie Sibblies Drury; directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz

Performances through April 7, 2019

Tyler Quincy Bernstine (center) and cast of Marys Seacole (photo: Julieta Cervantes)

Marys Seacole, based on the true story of a 19th century Jamaican woman whose behind the lines “British hotel” helped wounded soldiers convalesce during the Crimean War, is certainly an ambitious play. But Jackie Siubblies Drury has taken Seacole’s life and added on so much— including Mary’s fellow nurse Florence Nightingale’s own battlefield exploits to the selfless nurses and caregivers on a modern-day hospital ward—that the on-the-nose writing becomes suffocating, even eclipsing her own heroine as an exemplar of someone who values the well-being of others over her own survival.

Taking the outline of Mary’s eventful and worthy life (in 1991, she was posthumously awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit, and in 2004 she was voted the greatest black Briton), Drury has thrown linear biography to the wind, instead reordering Mary’s life through a funhouse mirror of different eras, characters and events. There are several other female characters, all with the initial M—including Mary’s mother, Druppy Mary—who are embodied by skillful actresses, including the always incisive Ismenia Mendes. Mary herself is played by the endlessly resourceful Quincy Tyler Bernstine, a magisterial performer in whatever she does. (I still remember her cameo in Kenneth Lonergan’s masterly Manchester by the Sea.) 

Unfortunately, Drury’s writing and Lileana Blain-Cruz’s directing isn’t insightful or gripping enough to allow the many segments and tonal shifts to cohere in any meaningful way. The capable cast is encouraged to shout and scream much of its dialogue, making for much shrillness amid the cacophony of sights and sounds. Chaka Khan’s hit “I’m Every Woman” not only is sung by Mary as a showstopper midway through but returns at the end so no one misses the apostrophe-less title’s very obvious point, a point which is laboriously hammered to death over the play’s 90 minutes. 

Despite such waywardness, there’s a kernel of a good play here, and the best moments hit on the same points with humor and simplicity. Even more subtlety would have made for a far more penetrating play.  

Marys Seacole

LCT 3 @ Lincoln Center Theater, 150 West 65th Street, New York, NY

lct.org

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