RITUAL
and the Kinetic Theatre Company
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This serious theme is boldly explored through a story and style that veer energetically, sometimes erratically, and always invigoratingly between overt poetic stylization, soap-opera melodrama, and barbed comedy of a particularly waspish sort. Ritual is often very funny, even when it’s most serious; and Clay’s ambition and intelligence, as expressed in the slick and edgy midwest premiere of his play, directed by Douglas Alan Mann at the Chicago Theatre Company, make for an exhilarating experience in the theater.
Just as Greek tragedies generally took lawgivers and their ladies as their main characters, Ritual’s heroes are a lawyer and his wife. Leon Becker (note the name’s kingly, leonine implications) is a rich man, whose status as a pillar of his society is suggested by the Greek-style columns that decorate his sprawling California home. Leon is also a very proud man–proud of his success, of his beautiful wife and brilliant son and dutiful daughter. But as he reveals in several soliloquies, which he delivers to the audience in a style made up equally of classical oratory and black street talk, he’s troubled by the fragility of his well-ordered inner and outer universes. Having made it to the top in white society, he reacts with fury when his son taunts him as a “good nigger,” yet he secretly shares that attitude: “At least some of us don’t use skin whiteners anymore,” he confides to the audience. “But oh, how we bleach away the dignity.”
