Danai Gurira’s engaging drama takes a new angle on the ever-intriguing clash of cultures. In this play, Donald (avuncular Kim Sullivan) and Marvelous (stick-straight Inga Ballard), émigrés from Zimbabwe and now naturalized American citizens living in Minnesota, are preparing for the marriage of their older daughter Tendi to Chris, an evangelical Christian. When Tendi and her sister Nyasha seek to introduce African cultural elements into a conventional Protestant ceremony, sparks fly. The sparks catch fire at the arrival of the young women’s aunt Anne (force of nature Cheryl Lynn Bruce). Everyone in this tangle is working from a base of good intentions, and yet feelings get smashed and promises broken.
The end of the first act is forced, depending as it does on unrealistic behavior on the part of Nyasha (flexible company member Shannon Dorsey) and some too-fast thinking by Chris’s best man and brother, dim bulb Brad (Andy Truschinski). However, it does set up a winning comic scene between the two at the top of the second act.
The characters’ speech rhythms are quite interesting, from Marvelous’ triple “Anyway, anyway, anyway” as a means to blow off frustration (repeated by her daughter later in the play) to Anne’s grunts and an expression of dismay, a bit of Shona that sounds like “my way.”
- Familiar, by Danai Gurira, directed by Adam Immerwahr, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington