Review: Aishah Rahman’s Chiaroscuro Looks at Colorism on a Singles Cruise

The National Black Theatre launched in 1968 and became one of the leading artistic institutions to emerge that era. It’s apt, then, that NBT’s directing resident abigail jean-bapiste would stage an unproduced piece from a playwright who came of age in the in the early 1970s, Aishah Rahman’s Chiaroscuro: A Light and Dark Skin Comedy.

Rahman published Chiaroscuro, a nautical No Exit set on a “Chocolate Singles” cruise, in 2010, four years before her death. And it’s clear that jean-baptiste approaches Rahman’s previously unstaged text, now produced at the Flea, with ample reverence, whimsy, and affection.

The challenge of posthumous premieres, though, is that the play has been frozen before the words reach performers’ mouths. There’s gentle provocation and some subtle amusement in the individual vignettes that build to an absurdist climax, but, taken all at once, the play would have benefited from a tightening and trimming that its production history rendered impossible.

Though Rahman’s most pointed insights around colorism and Black women’s light-skinned privilege are shrewdly deconstructed in the play’s final scenes, the satirical approach and Sartrean setup never cohere into a compellingly dramatic whole.

That’s not the fault of jean-baptiste, who, with her glossy production, creates a stylish and sleek vessel for this unwieldy play. Staged on a reflective black floor with audiences on two sides, the interplay of Jungah Han’s set and Maruti Evans’s cleverly varied lighting design often creates striking, liquid effects. And given the glamorous evening wear from costume designer Azalea Fairley, the playing space often feels like an underwater catwalk.

It’s an overall aesthetic that seems more sharply rendered and expressive than the play itself, though the acting ensemble does mainly fine work in filling out the sketchily drawn singles who swiftly trade partners thanks to the naughty machinations of Paul Paul Legba (Paige Gilbert), the trickster spirit who stewards the ship. There’s the lovelorn Sienna (Gayle Samuels), surprised to be reunited on board with the maybe-baby-daddy Tilman (Lance Coadie Williams) of her grown daughter.

But she’s pursued by the much younger Nayron (Sidney DuPont), just out of prison (“I’ve been cited 150 times for BWB, Breathing While Black,” he clarifies). Tilman’s after a more youthful fling, too: He’s set his sights on La Honda Deja Vue (Abenaa Quïïn), characterized in the script as a “Black dumb blonde,” who often breaks out into a ridiculous French accent. There’s unexpectedly fiery chemistry between Sienna and DuPont, with Samuels especially impressive in toggling between the dying embers of a decades-old love affair and the new fresh flame she finds herself fanning.

All the women wear a range of lightening makeup to signal their characters’ spectrum of skin tones, with the “fairest” and thus most popular passenger, Gina Rose (Ebony Marshall-Oliver), donning a full face mask and a sort of knitted white bodysuit. It’s here that Chiaroscuro poses its greatest dramaturgical challenge since it’s deliberate that the audience remain unenlightened until late in the play how to make sense of this outlandish look.

But Marshall-Oliver beautifully delivers a barnstormer of a monologue in the penultimate scene that sums up Rahman’s thoughts on colorism with a clarity that the play elsewhere lacks. “I don’t see color,” the haughty Russ (TL Thompson) insists, but Gina Rose firmly rejects his claim, insisting that the desire to be proximate to whiteness, especially women’s whiteness, runs deadly deep: “It’s in everyone’s eyes,” she says.

The voyage to that poignant port is bumpier, though, with the tone never settling between the passengers’ flirtatious banter (“I’m like good pepper sauce. I get better with age”) and their growing concern that this may, in fact, be an uncaptained ship to nowhere. “This boat is traveling only in the direction of your mind,” Paul Paul Legba pseudo-explains, but the onboard mystery never satisfies.

Jean-baptiste, at least, has curated a galvanizing playlist for the journey, including Bessie Smith, Nina Simone, and Tracy Chapman. That makes for a joyous soundtrack to underscore a smooth-sailing production of a play that’s not quite seaworthy all on its own.