Mean streets

Trinity's Preface is no garden party

by Carolyn Clay

A PREFACE TO THE ALIEN GARDEN. By Robert Alexander. Directed by Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe. Designed by Eugene Lee, William Lane, Yael Lubetzky, and Peter Hurowitz. Fight choreography by Normand Beauregard. With Nehassaiu deGannes, Keskhemnu, John Douglas Thompson, Donn Swaby, Tanganyika, Jenn Schulte, Jay Walker, and Anthony Burton. At Trinity Repertory Company, through April 3.

I admit that my knowledge of gangsta rap begins and ends with Nathan Detroit. Or it did until I saw A Preface to the Alien Garden, the forceful if prosaic piece of rhythmic agitprop having its world premiere at Trinity Repertory Company as part of the third Providence New Play Festival. Robert Alexander's graphic depiction of gang life -- replete with sex, coke, killing, and enough profanity to make Snoop Doggy Dog reach for a blue pencil -- has already caused a flap, landing on the front page of the Providence Journal before it even opened. The main questions seem to be whether the play is the cautionary tale its author intends or a glorification of brute, swaggering gang life and whether it paints a stereotypical picture of scary young African-Americans. Over in the margin is the question of whether A Preface to the Alien Garden is good theater.

Certainly the play makes a visceral impact, in both its casual violence and its insistent beat. You enter the theater to the inflammatory thump of gangsta rap and the constant circling of a searchlight. The walls are etched with graffiti. The dialogue runs to "mother fucker." But there is also a poetic aspect to the work, from its occasionally rapped dialogue to its main character's apocalyptic fantasy -- which is based in part on the Book of Ezekiel and in part on the 1986 George Clinton/Parliament-Funkadelic live record Mothership Connection -- about powerful black aliens coming for to carry her home.

The juxtaposition of the internecine struggles of the Slanging Zulus -- a set of the LA-based Crips selling drugs and smoking folks in Kansas City -- and "number one gun" Lisa Body's committed flights of fancy may be the most interesting thing about A Preface to the Alien Garden. The play otherwise tends toward pushing, screaming, and pointing out that gang culture has less to do with natural-born-killing than with making money. In the end, however, the staging makes it unclear whether Lisa, having delivered a predictable "I am your worst nightmare" speech to the largely white-middle-class Trinity audience, strides off into the mean streets to which our apathy has relegated her or is indeed about to mount the mother ship. Is this On the Waterfront or E.T.?

Alexander -- who is probably best known for I Ain't Yo' Uncle, the New Jack Revisionist Uncle Tom's Cabin -- describes the play as agitprop rather than as poetic drama or Afro-futurism. He says he wrote it as a way to connect with his teenage son, using the language of gangsta rap, a music the playwright describes as "mean-spirited, woman-hating, and nihilistic, obsessed with material consumption and greed." It is also, he admits, "angry, loud, and seductive."

Certainly A Preface to the Alien Garden is angry and loud; some educators and community leaders fear it may also be seductive and are warning targeted youth to stay away. Trinity Rep, for its part, is pushing the work as "a play America didn't want you to see: so provocative no other theater company would risk producing it." Artistic director Oskar Eustis says that, upon reading the script and finding it exciting, he tried to flip the hot potato into a number of other hands, in cities more gang-plagued than Providence, before agreeing to serve it up himself.

At the center of A Preface to the Alien Garden, along with tough-as-nails 17-year-old Lisa Body, is a generation conflict between G Roc, leader of the beleaguered Kansas City set, and his LA mentor, a less violent if equally unprincipled hustler named Slick Rick, who shows up to try to temper things after G Roc has shot his own brother. (A highlight is a "war of words" between the two, with Rick, whose musical roots go back to doo-wop and bebop, out-rapping "gangsta" G Roc.) Rick seduces Lisa by pretending to be the prophet Ezekiel of her spaceship dreams; when she gets wise, her violent rage pulls down the already shaky structure of the group. By most accounts, Preface's depiction of gang life -- a mix of the Lost Boys and Murder Inc. -- is not inaccurate. But somehow I doubt that feminist takeovers, regardless of how cold-blooded the females, are prevalent.

Be that as it may, Trinity gives Alexander a smoking production, with a blazing turn by Keskhemnu as G Roc, a hypnotic one by Nehassaiu deGannes as Lisa, and a Sportin' Life-worthy performance by John Douglas Thompson as Slick Rick. The ensemble is muscular and committed, conveying the sadness as well as the toughness of the characters. The bare-bones crackhouse setting is effective, with a hydra-headed disco ball standing in for both police lights and the mother ship. And director Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe rides a fine line between believability and sensationalism (the violence, though disturbing, pales before that of the movies). Still, if this is just A Preface to the Alien Garden, I don't want to read the first chapter. And neither, I think he is saying, does Robert Alexander.