No slam dunk Letta Neely’s Last Rites BY LIZA WEISSTUCH
	Last Rites By Letta Neely. Directed by Brian Freeman. Set by Mirta Tocci. Lighting by Nicolas Vargelis. Costumes by Mikki Shefton. Sound by Jeff Wragg. With Naeemah A. White-Peppers, Renita Martin, Abria Smith, and Michelle Dowd. Presented by the Theatre Offensive and Wildheart Press at the Boston Center for the Arts through April 24.

Theater has always served as platform where artists can offer social commentary in dramatic form, but sometimes a play that means to address political issues sacrifices plot in the process. Such is the case with Letta Neely’s Last Rites, a world premiere presented by the Theatre Offensive in collaboration with Wildheart Press, which has published Neely’s poetry volumes. Neely’s footing as a political playwright was established with her first work, Hamartia Blues, which TTO produced in 2002. That play was a nesting-doll drama that revealed the adversities faced by minorities within minority communities, specifically a black woman who not only deals with the hardships of inner-city life but must come to terms with her lesbianism while contending with a scheming brother about to be released from prison.

In Last Rites, Neely doesn’t bother to layer the social and personal issues. She lays it all bare on the stage (literally at times) like an enormous smorgasbord that includes hearty servings of corrosive drug abuse, the horrors of breast cancer, racism, sexual identity linked with body image and butch pride, betrayal between friends, and the plagued health-care system. And that’s just in the first 45 minutes. Needless to say, none of these issues is garnished with surprise. And harrowing though the characters’ conditions may be, I was too caught up in digesting their banquet of heavy woes to feel any nourishment. It’s MTV for the stage, from the flashy accounts of coke highs to the blunt talk that asserts an awareness of social ills to the hip-hop soundtrack.

Dutch (Naeemah A. White-Peppers) is tending to Patrice (Renita Martin), her childhood friend and high-school basketball teammate, who’s in the final stages of cancer and has apparently been released from the hospital to die. Most of the play takes place in Dutch’s Mission Hill apartment, a cozily retro-fitted set by Mirta Tocci that’s bathed in Nicolas Vargelis’s sepia-toned lighting, as if to evoke the nostalgia of old photographs. A reminiscent tone dominates the play, but not the mawkish kind. Patrice and Dutch are tough-as-nails butches of color, and both have a lot of anger to air before Patrice succumbs.

Although she’s resigned to not fighting the cancer anymore, Patrice has the deep-seated survival instincts you’d expect from an athlete and a woman who’s trounced a coke habit and asserted her sexuality in the face of a Bible-thumping upbringing. The play’s most poignant moments come when she interacts with her Trinidadian fire-and-brimstone-talking mother, a role to which Michelle Dowd gives stirring yet sad intensity. That relationship is just one of many demons to be exorcised as part of Patrice’s last rites. There are also confessions about how her butch image factored into her mastectomy years ago, the guilt about waiting too long before seeing a doctor, the matter of her coke-addled girlfriend Asha, and the need to clarify what Asha’s relationship with Dutch has been about all along. The snag in this dramatic fabric is that Martin turns in too vigorous a performance for her dying character. Despite her bald scalp and a foul bit involving Depends (the only unsettling reminder of lethal illness), she flaunts lively appetites, an energetically expressed ’tude, and a steely scowl, all of which betray the agony of terminal-cancer victims. Under Brian Freeman’s uneven direction, White-Peppers turns in a more plausible performance. Swimming in oversized clothing, her Dutch touches on every stereotype in the book; yet you can sense her tiptoeing around the issue of how to express anger at the friend she deeply cares for.

The play owes its best moments to Neely’s tight, poetic grip on the dialogue, which bounces like the basketball the women dribble and shoot at a net rigged up on stage. Even after an airball like "You ain’t got no reason to push me away," she’ll rebound with comic cynicism or a sassy jab. But when it comes to the number of issues she wants to address, Neely should have passed one or two off.