In The Red And Brown Water(#5)

In the Red and Brown Water by Tarell Alvin McCraney is play set in the Louisiana Bayou at a time that is described as the "distant present". The play has many characters, but they all revolve around one girl whose name is Oya. Oya is a great runner who is given a chance to run for a college, but declines when her mother gets sick and eventually dies. Around her is her Aunt, a couple of boyfriends, such as Shango, and others that make up the community around her. While from the first moment of the play to the last Oya's life doesn't make any major changes, the men and women around are continually going on with their lives and changing in abrupt and sometimes radical new ways. A major plot is her want to have a child, but the inability for either of her boyfriends to get her pregnant. This comes to a peak when Oya is informed that her ex-boyfriend Shango has impregnated another girl. As a response, Oya cuts off the ear that Shango had caressed so many times before and gives it to him. 

Throughout the play, Oya had a lot at stake in terms of her future. She turned away from it for reasons that are easily understood. For instance, she turns away from running in college to stay with her dying mother. This creates a perpetual idleness in her where though she may change friends or boyfriends, her life is essentially unchanged and she still sits on the porch of her house as she always had, and watches others around her continue with their lives and change. For instance, Shango joins the army and goes away, and when he returns home, Oya will not leave her boyfriend, and he eventually impregnates another girl. This reveals the true depths in which the play goes to show how others are changing in ways she wants, but is unable to accomplish. Another boy who she has watched grow up also impregnates another girl, and his changing is both in responsibility and personality shows the extent in which growth and change is accomplished. Oya never finds a way to move forward in her life and change the path she chose unknowingly when she decided to not go to college.

The acting was, by far, the best part of the play. While the story seemed, at times, outlandish and uncanny, the actors were able to pull it in and make the characters believable and sympathetic.  For instance, Oya is constantly put down in the play with bad timing, decisions that hurt her down the line, and chance. But she is played by the actress as not a weak woman who is crushed by the circumstances around her, but a powerful woman who constantly yearns to stride to the life she wants and to mold her current life into what she sees for herself, but is unable to through the sickness of her mother and her inability to get pregnant. Also, the first time Shango enters into the play, he seems like a one-dimensional character, but evolves throughout the play, from the moment he joins the military to the ending, to become another sympathetic character where we see his motivations and why he does his actions.

This was my first time seeing a live theater performance, and it was pretty good. I had dread going into it and wasn't at all excited for it, but it was entertaining and thought-provoking. Though I thought the play itself wasn't great, the talent and interactions of the actors on stage was compelling and the most enjoyable part.