• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Advertise
  • Contact Us
  • About Towleroad
  • Towleroad on Social Media
  • Privacy Policy

Towleroad Gay News

Gay Blog Towleroad: More than gay news | gay men

  • Travel
  • Sports
  • Law/Justice
  • Celebrities
  • Film/TV/Stream
  • Republicans
  • Madonna
  • Books
  • Men
  • Trans Rights
  • Tech/Science
  • Royals
  • Monkeypox

Inherited Histories Explode in Dynamite ‘Marys Seacole’ Off-Broadway: REVIEW

Naveen Kumar February 25, 2019 Leave a Comment

LCT3 MarysSeacole foreground Quincy Tyler Bernstine and Karen Kandel. background LtoR Ismenia Mendes Lucy Taylor and Marceline Hugot 691

When “I’m Every Woman” rings out triumphantly over Marys Seacole, an astonishing, history-exploding new play by Jackie Sibblies Drury, Whitney Houston has never sounded so apt. And not simply because every member of this remarkable six-woman cast walks around in the same pair of sensible pink sneakers.

The subject of Drury’s play, which opens off-Broadway tonight at Lincoln Center’s LCT3, is Mary Seacole, a Jamaican-born healer, businesswoman, and author of an 1857 travel memoir. After Florence Nightingale refused her services, Seacole set up her own hotel to care for British soldiers during the Crimean War. Victorian Britain came to revere her, to the extent that it could a creole woman. “If you don’t know who she is,” Drury’s script reads, “look her the f**k up.”

LCT3 MarysSeacole LtoR Ismenia Mendes Quincy Tyler Bernstine Karen Kandel Lucy Taylor. foreground Gabby Beans and Marceline Hugot 676

Audiences will know a great deal more about her by the end of these electrifying 90 minutes. They’ll also be compelled to reckon, in ways both thrilling and primal, with mortality, motherhood, ancestral and colonial legacies, and no less than what it means to be any kind of woman.

Mary (a searing Quincy Tyler Bernstine) introduces herself from a modest pedestal, heaving off her shoulders the weight of untold histories to give it to us straight. “I am the only historian of myself and my accomplishments, and so I shall try to speak from my own experience, simply,” as she later puts it. Mary soon sheds her 19th-century finery to reveal present-day nurse’s scrubs, in which she’ll change the sheets of a dying woman who’s just shit the bed.

LCT3 MarysSeacole LtoR Marceline Hugot and Ismenia Mendes 79

With one step off Mary’s pedestal, Drury traces an ancestral line between a woman renowned for tending to British sons and daughters to an immigrant service provider tasked with both emotional labor and dirty work no one else wants to do. In both centuries, Mary is serving white women (and men) who amount to equal part patron and succubus — furnishing her means to survive while siphoning off her human dignity. Ultimately it’s the same shit, different era.

Drury bends, suspends, and ultimately shatters conventions of time and space altogether, in order to tease out threads of inheritance systematically overlooked by the churn of western history. Somehow the play is also a total hoot. This is a spectacular feat, accomplished with a sharp sort of expressionism by director Lileana Blain-Cruz. A nurse’s station transforms into a rum-soaked bar at a convalescent resort on Jamaican shores. The glass partition to a waiting room also demarcates a liminal space of elegiac memories.

LCT3 MarysSeacole foreground LtoR Ismenia Mendes and Quincy Tyler Bernstine. Background Karen Kandel 241

A maternal woman in Victorian black, referred to in the script as ‘Drury’ or spirit Mary, affixes Mary with a bluetooth earpiece when she steps into the present, a first puncture through time that lands with a laugh. Mary’s ancestral mother proceeds to haunt her with sporadic dropped phone calls. Yes, history, it seems, has Mary’s number on speed dial. It’s just the wry sort of gesture that makes Marys Seacole so exhilarating to watch, waiting to see what facet of the truth it’s about to reveal next.

Recent theatre features…
Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano Play Men Behaving Badly in ‘True West’ on Broadway: REVIEW
In ‘Bleach,’ Confessions of a Rent Boy in a Brooklyn Basement: REVIEW
Black, Gay, and Striving to be Heard in ‘Choir Boy’ on Broadway: REVIEW
Towleroad’s Top 10 Plays and Musicals of 2018
The Most Interesting Part of Broadway’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Already Happened Off Stage: REVIEW
Bryan Cranston Headlines a Bold but Bloodless ‘Network’ on Broadway: REVIEW
Broadway’s ‘The Cher Show’ Is a Feast for Fans and an Assertion of Legacy: REVIEW
Feel-Good New Musical ‘The Prom’ Wears a Big Heart on Its Puffy Sleeve – REVIEW
Broadway’s ‘American Son’ Starring Kerry Washington Is the Most Vacuous Kind of Race Play: REVIEW

Follow Naveen Kumar on Twitter: @Mr_NaveenKumar

(photos: julieta cervantes)

Topics: Entertainment, Music, Theater, towleroad, Travel More Posts About: Jackie Sibblies Drury, Marys Seacole, Naveen Kumar

Related Posts
  • ‘Circle Jerk’s Gleeful Chaos Breaks New Ground for Streaming Theatre: REVIEW
  • Towleroad’s Top 10 Plays and Musicals of 2019
  • ‘Jagged Little Pill’ Is a Raw and Explosive Portrait of Suburbia on the Brink: REVIEW
  • Kenny Goss: I didn’t want to be Mrs George Michael

    Kenny Goss: I didn’t want to be Mrs George Michael

    Published by BANG Showbiz English Kenny Goss didn’t want to be “Mrs George Michael”. The 63-year-old businessman had a 13-year relationship with the pop icon – who died on Christmas Day in 2016, aged 53 – …Read More »
  • Adele feels ‘mortified’ over Las Vegas residency

    Adele feels ‘mortified’ over Las Vegas residency

    Published by BANG Showbiz English Adele finds the thought of letting down her fans to be “mortifying”. The 34-year-old singer feels she failed her fans by postponing her residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas earlier …Read More »
  • Biden predicts states will try to arrest women who travel for abortions

    Biden predicts states will try to arrest women who travel for abortions

    Published by Reuters By Jeff Mason and Rami Ayyub WASHINGTON (Reuters) -President Joe Biden predicted on Friday that some U.S. states will try to arrest women for crossing state lines to get abortions after the Supreme …Read More »
  • Elliot Page signs up for his ‘first ever dating app’

    Elliot Page signs up for his ‘first ever dating app’

    Published by BANG Showbiz English Elliot Page is on his “first dating app ever”. The 35-year-old actor – who separated from Emma Portner in January 2021 after three years of marriage – revealed that he is …Read More »
Previous Post: « Chicago Police Chief Eddie Johnson Went on GMA to ‘Ensure Record Gets Set Straight’ on Jussie Smollett Case: WATCH
Next Post: Australia’s Cardinal George Pell, Vociferous Opponent of Marriage Equality, Convicted of Raping Two 13 Year-Old Choirboys »

Primary Sidebar

News

  • Lindsay Lohan marries financier Bader Shammas

    Lindsay Lohan marries financier Bader Shammas

  • Horseshoe crabs: ‘Living fossils’ vital for vaccine safety

    Horseshoe crabs: ‘Living fossils’ vital for vaccine safety

  • ‘A Disgusting Sight In Any Case’: Vladimir Putin Fires Back After G7 Leaders Joke About His Infamous Horse-Riding Picture

    ‘A Disgusting Sight In Any Case’: Vladimir Putin Fires Back After G7 Leaders Joke About His Infamous Horse-Riding Picture

RSS Partner Links

  • Sunday Comics
  • Speedo Sunday
  • Natalie Portman, Idris Elba, & More Stars Check Out Adele's Hyde Park Performance in London!
  • Cynthia Erivo Comes Out As Bisexual
  • Naomie Harris Criticizes 'Disturbing' Amount of Media Coverage Johnny Depp & Amber Heard's Trial Received
  • Travis Scott's First Festival Since Astroworld Tragedy Gets Canceled
  • Bret Michaels Breaks Silence on Hospitalization, Shares New Details About Health Condition

Most Recent

  • What charges might Trump face for trying to overturn 2020 election?

    What charges might Trump face for trying to overturn 2020 election?

  • Kenny Goss: I didn’t want to be Mrs George Michael

    Kenny Goss: I didn’t want to be Mrs George Michael

  • Adele feels ‘mortified’ over Las Vegas residency

    Adele feels ‘mortified’ over Las Vegas residency

  • Biden predicts states will try to arrest women who travel for abortions

    Biden predicts states will try to arrest women who travel for abortions

  • Elliot Page signs up for his ‘first ever dating app’

    Elliot Page signs up for his ‘first ever dating app’

  • Mac Engel Column: WNBA player speaks honest truth about Brittney Griner: ‘If this was Shaq, he’d be home’

    Mac Engel Column: WNBA player speaks honest truth about Brittney Griner: ‘If this was Shaq, he’d be home’

  • Gay Man Tells Co-Worker to Stop Talking to Him About Her Pregnancy: ‘I Don’t Care’

    Gay Man Tells Co-Worker to Stop Talking to Him About Her Pregnancy: ‘I Don’t Care’

  • Biles, Denzel Washington, Rapinoe among winners of top US honor

    Biles, Denzel Washington, Rapinoe among winners of top US honor

Most Commented

Social

Twitter @tlrd | Facebook | Instagram @tlrd
  • Advertise
  • Contact Us
  • About Towleroad
  • Towleroad on Social Media
  • Privacy Policy
[towleroadmr] [towleroadtn]

Footer

Copyright © 2022 · Log in