 Media Credit: Ryan Joyce Diana Mirambeaux-Saker and Kenard Jackson play spouses whose marriage sours in 'No.'
| |
This weekend, the Dramatics Society of Boston College presented the final production of its season, the provocatively titled No Niggers, No Jews, No Dogs, set against the backdrop of a small North Carolina town. In the play written by John Henry Redwood, a Jewish man named Yaveni (the delightful Nicholas Hanovice, A&S '10) has come to Halifax in 1949 to do research for a book of his that will be a comparative study of racism on the plight of the Jewish man to that of the black man. He pays the family of Mattie (Diana Mirambeaux-Saker, A&S '09) to allow him to observe their daily lives as source material. Tensions emerge between the two, who do not understand each other - Yaveni goes to a temple to worship on Saturdays and disrupts the Christian day of worship for the family on Sundays.
Things come to change one day, however, when Mattie's eccentric Aunt Cora (Grace Illingworth, A&S '10) frightens him, leading him to run back to their home in fear, where he overhears that Mattie has been raped. While the play focuses on Mattie's plight, who was raped by the same man as her Aunt Cora, whose family was destroyed and who now lives the life of a crazed hermit, the three's lives become inextricably linked, leading each on profound journeys that will forever change them.
Dogs was an interesting choice for director and president of the Dramatics Society Alessandra Brown (A&S '08) to have produced, because while controversial, the play is far from perfect. While the juxtaposition of the struggle of a Jewish man whose family was killed in the Holocaust with that of a black family in the South in the pre-civil rights era provides a fresh tenor in which to tackle such a common vehicle of predjudice, Redwood's writing does not trust itself.
Although Mattie's plight captivates the audience throughout the play, Redwood has written a cheap ending that wraps things up for her as if she were a stupid child in a candy store. Mattie, a woman who quotes Leviticus, talks of church eloquently, and does not allow her children to take the Lord's name in vain, turns out to be a heathen herself, a huge hypocritical mess of a woman. When Aunt Cora takes vengeance on the man who has brought so much harm to her family, while Mattie says she'll have to go to church to ask for forgiveness, she doesn't do anything. She just wipes the blood of her arms and calls it a day. The same goes for Yaveni, a man who has dedicated his life to reversing the effects of racism.
2008 Woodie Awards
