Many people have the idea that when it comes to plays, you either engulf yourself in the world of theater or go to plays only when you need a classy place to take the significant other on an anniversary.
But 'Crumbs from the Table of Joy,' which opened last weekend at Mitchell Theater in Vilas Hall, is good enough to temporarily suspend that practice.
The story is that of 17-year-old Ernestine Crump (Aaliyah Sams), a young girl growing up in 1950s Brooklyn. She struggles to discover her identity in a household polarized between her strict Christian father and her indignant, communist aunt Lily.
This play, like so many other dramatic works, gives us an endless list of conflicts to mull over. Ernestine fails to fit in with her surroundings because she's black when everyone else on her block is white, a hillbilly when everyone else in the city is urban and quiet while everyone in her house talks endlessly.
Add to that the conflicts between sacred and secular, protectiveness and open-mindedness, capitalism and communism and before you know it you've got more conflict crammed into two and a half hours than a third world country is likely to see in a year.
But what keeps the play from veering off into abstract, sociological speechifying are the characters, each one rendered believably flawed yet endearing by the talented cast.
The boisterous, angry rhetoric of aunt Lily never gets tiring because Letecia Bryan injects her character with a joyous lust for life that permeates the stage. Patrick Sims (the father) emphasizes the working-man stability and fatherly love that informs his character, making it so we can't help but like him even when he insists on calling his daughter 'Darling Angel' because the preacher told him to.
Most of all, though, Aaliyah Sams carries the heart of this play in the moments where Ernestine shuns the confusion around her and directly addresses the audience. When she reminds us how much more exciting life would be if people resolved conflicts through dancing instead of fighting'like they did in ancient Africa and Hollywood musicals'you can't help but smile at the connection. Sams expertly pulls off Ernestine's affecting balance between childlike sincerity and intellectual profundity.
The writer of this play, Lynn Nottage, consistently references the Tennessee Williams and Lorraine Hansberry plays that 'Crumbs' seems to be modeled on. Ernestine's escapist love of cinema brings to mind Tom from 'The Glass Menagerie;' her status as an intellectual trapped in a working class family alludes to Beneatha from 'A Raisin in the Sun.'
While these references provide something interesting to chew on, they also remind you that this play doesn't live up to it's thematic predecessors. Williams and Hansberry grounded their characters' speeches of despair in convincingly real households, but too frequently 'Crumbs' sacrifices establishing a true-to-life scenario in favor of one that allows a character to reach their third or fourth emotional crossroads.
Those redundant moments are easily brushed aside by the vitality and humor each actor brings to their role, the beauty of the writing and the startling combination of the abstract and the expected that makes up the set. Long story short, these Crumbs are something you don't want to brush off the table.
