Shades of black New Rep paints a vivid Yellowman BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Yellowman By Dael Orlandersmith. Directed by Lois Roach. Set by Hector Fernandez. Costumes by Frances Nelson McSherry. Lighting by John R. Malinowski. With Adrienne D. Williams and Dorian Christian Baucum. At New Repertory Theatre through April 4.

Racism within racism — hatred nested like Russian dolls — is the troubling subject of Yellowman. Dael Orlandersmith’s play, which was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, is a lyrical account, told in alternating monologues, of a romance — and lives — shaped and shattered by the seldom explored prejudices that exist among African-Americans of different hues.

The truths let loose here, in a story bounded by pride, poverty, alcohol, Southern swelter, and resentments that snake back generations, are painful. But this is no strident exposé of divisions within the black community. The art of Orlandersmith’s story is in its telling, at an earthy yet dreamy once-remove that blunts its incipient melodrama. "There’s a fluidity to the heat in South Carolina/Watching certain objects — maybe certain fields of cotton, corn, tobacco/There seems to be some sort of rippling effect," begins the dark-skinned Alma, setting up the tale of a life-long liaison with the "butter-colored" Eugene that will, in fact, shimmer even as it destructs. The play’s evocative, no-guff cadence recalls Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. And the powerful depiction of the way in which one generation’s bitterness due to race poisons its hope for the next conjures August Wilson’s Pulitzer-winning Fences. In vitally and melodiously recounting African-American experience of the 20th century, Orlandersmith is in good company.

In the play’s Boston-area premiere at New Repertory Theatre, under the unobtrusive direction of Lois Roach, an effervescent Adrienne D. Williams (Alma) and a lithe Dorian Christian Baucum (Eugene) share a stage bare but for two chairs and a mini-proscenium. Alternately basking in the spotlight, playing a host of characters in addition to the main ones, they tell a story of a schoolyard friendship that began in the 1960s to the strain of the Monkees and later blossomed into romance, despite Eugene’s aimlessness, Alma’s ambition, and the malice glimmering on the color spectrum.

Fatherless, Alma grows up with a maternal mantra of "big, awkward, poor, and dark." Eugene recalls an imposing, "jet-black" father and the light-skinned mother he resembles; her family disowned her for marrying dark. Even as children, both feel the hatred coursing off their parents, Eugene’s dad sneering at his "soft," "high-yella" son, Alma’s mom transferring her own angry self-loathing to the daughter who somehow, in the course of her growing, both embraces and deflects a downtrodden yet enduring inheritance. Only one of the lovers escapes the cycle of an oppressed race’s hatred turned in on itself, and she at the cost of the keenness that had seemed ingrained. In the end, the tale turns lurid, but the shared, poetic coda of sense memory and regret puts a patina on even that.

Orlandersmith, an Obie-winning actor who played Alma in the original McCarter Theatre production of Yellowman, is definitely a writer, even if she is not yet quite a playwright. A native of East Harlem who summered with relatives in the sultry scorch of South Carolina, she evokes the heat and earth and barefoot exuberance of rural Southern life in an African-American community she experienced partly as an outsider, where differences were calibrated by what kind of blue-collar work you did, your skin tone, whether you talked "like people on TV" or with a Gullah/Geechie accent, and whether you lived inside the city limits with an indoor john. Later, when Alma goes north on a college scholarship, Orlandersmith beats a different, lyrical pulse for the neighborhoods of New York, which are being discovered for the first time by a bright young spirit settling into her own body and stride.

Despite the vivid imagery and the skillfully foreshadowed explosion of violence, the play’s narrative format makes for some stasis. There’s a lot of repetition, only some of it for the sake of theme and poetry. At two and a half hours (including intermission), the work seems longer than need be. Still, it is language that makes this train move, and the New York–based Williams and local-theater vet Baucum prove good conductors. In Williams’s open-faced, large-boned Alma, who’s brought up to be strong and shrinking at the same time, there is a riveting mix of sturdiness, shame, sass, and sensuality. And Baucum brings to Eugene, both as child and as burgeoning man, an innocence and good will that deepen one’s sadness over his hate- and booze-spurred fate — out of which no good comes, unless it’s in Orlandersmith’s unflinching accounting.