THE 1041C Theater Reviews

A Free Man of Color was an entertaining and amusing experience to sit through and there was barely a dull moment to be found in the production. It was always fast-paced and laden with enough humor to keep the audience’s attention at all times. All the characters provided entertainment in their own way and there was not one character who I would describe as uninteresting, even the minor ones managed to catch your interest for at least one moment.

As the play began, the aspect that first caught my attention was the well-crafted set: an elaborately decorated living space with a busy atmosphere that really caught the sense of fun and fine living. The use of the stage’s mechanisms such as trap doors provided a quick and effective method of indicating scene changes, as the entire set can transform into a completely different environment within only a few seconds. The use of the trap doors as actual parts of the story, such as a hidden safe or entrance to the underside of a ship, were also clever uses of the stage’s machinery to add to the play. Another set that particularly impressed me was the bayou area, with the dilapidated houses and buildings in the background. These were actually made of nothing more than wooden boards put together in such angles as to create the illusion of depth, making the background props seem to stretch further into the back than they truly were. However, the swamp set, which consisted of vaguely vine shaped green objects hanging from the ceiling seemed to leave a bit to be desired. I felt the vines looked a bit too cartoony and more like large foam cut outs of green blobs than vines. Then again, the characters searching through the swamps with nothing more than the lights of their lanterns provided an ominous effect to the scene, which really added to the suspense of the climax.

As for the characters of the play, many of them were very entertaining and enjoyable to watch. Jeffrey Wright, who played the lead character Jacques Cornet, delivered his performance perfectly, managing to make a lecherous, deceptive man into a fairly charming and likeable character. Wright performed the role of a boisterous, self-obsessed aristocrat to the best of anyone’s ability and watching this in action was a highly entertaining experience. I also had particular fondness for the character of Napoleon, presented by actor Triney Sandoval as a miserable, over-compensating caricature of the French emperor. Although not a prominent character in the play, he had a major role in the plot, and the antics he performed as he was making major political decisions served as humorous juxtapositions of silly actions and serious matters. I especially enjoyed the scene wherein Napoleon is in the background, walking across pans of water that his soldiers obediently lay down before him in fear of scorpions scurrying across the grounds of Haiti. Another character I enjoyed was Zeus-Marie Pincepousse, the jealous half-brother of Jacques Cornet. Although an antagonist, Pincepousse is portrayed in a pitiable role, as the son of an aristocrat whose inheritance was given not to him, but instead to his enslaved half-brother, and if losing his fortune to him wasn’t enough, Cornet later steals the heart of his beloved wife. Reg Rogers plays the character of Pincepousse well, being able to express his conniving side without sacrificing sympathy for the character, who the audience should fully understand seems to be justified in his anger.

The writing of the play is another exceptional trait, with its witty banter and clever use of double entendre. Almost no character seemed to lack some sort of humorous moment and it’s hard to say that any part of the play was boring. Each character seemed to have a role in the story and none seemed to have been extraneous to the plot.

But going away from the praise, there were some things I felt were not quite up to par. As far as characters go, I would say the least interesting one would have been the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture,” played by rapper and actor Mos Def. This is no downplay of the character’s importance or the actor’s acting ability, but more that L’Ouverture’s personality seemed out of place. Here we have a play with a multitude of outrageous and exaggerated  characters and there’s this one man who plays his character seriously in every scene he’s in. That’s not to say serious characters are not acceptable in such a production, but if they are present they usually can gain humor from their interactions with the more eccentric characters, such as Murmur’s (also played by Mos Def) dynamic with his master Cornet. L’Ouverture never has any scene in which he has a comic foil to his straight man routine, and so he just seems to be a character from a historical drama who somehow stumbled on the set of a historic comedy.

Another part of the play I felt was a bit poor was the ending. The ending seemed to drag on for a lot longer than necessary, and I couldn’t help but feel that certain parts of it, such as the scene in which Cornet is pleading the various historical figures to find some way to free him, could have been cut down a bit. I think the ending was a good one, and effective despite the mood whiplash it presents in comparison to the previous lighthearted humor of the first act, but it loses a lot of its impact from the fact that it goes on for so long. It seemed so odd to me, that my attention had been firmly grasped for the majority of the play, but as it neared the ending and I started becoming unsure when it was going to end, my interest started to slip away. I found myself not caring about what Meriwether Lewis had to say about his thoughts before suicide (I’m not even sure if that’s what he was talking about) and eventually losing my interest in Cornet becoming enslaved, more interested in when he was gonna get sold off so they can finally end the scene.

Other than those few things I didn’t care for, “A Free Man of Color” has certainly been placed in one of the top most enjoyable plays I’ve seen. Considering the one I watched was one of the earliest releases, I hope that later performances will address some of the issues I raised and make the play more streamlined.