Unbecoming Tragedy: A Ritual Journey Towards Destiny
Long Wharf Theatre @ Yale Off Broadway Theater
41 Broadway
Through June 1
When we meet Terrence Riggins, the playwright and solo performer of the Long Wharf Theatre’s Unbecoming Tragedy, he’s in jail again for drug possession. Specifically, he’s in solitary confinement.
Riggins “defended his esophagus” from another inmate, which, in turn, led to a full-on battle. It’s from solitary (rendered with a claustrophobic verisimilitude by set designer Omid Akbari) where, given a pen and paper by an unseen prison guard, Riggins is struck with the idea to write the play we’re watching. After all, before anything else, Riggins is an actor; during his previous incarceration, he discovered August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and upon release, he successfully landed the role of Herald Loomis.
A quick peek at Riggins-the-actor’s resume confirms that Riggins took the role of Herald at CalState Northridge. Though Riggins may be ultimately playing a fictionalized version of himself, it’s clear the play has a deep autobiographical basis.
“Writing the play which constitutes the play itself” is a common metatheatrical device — take the Pulitzer-Prize winning production A Strange Loop, or the winking end of SMASH: The Musical. In Unbecoming Tragedy, Riggins uses this device to create something more complex than straightforward memoir.
Instead, the play refracts into discrete storylines, each increasingly divorced from reality. There are the “present” circumstances of the play’s creation (the main action in the cell, where toothpaste ticks signal his mother’s approaching birthday), the play he performs to the brick wall of his cell (the audience, christened as “brickface”), and surreal dream sequences (where Riggins is pushed through memory and ultimately confronts the demons he dares not speak aloud).
If this sounds disparate, under the wrong hands it could be. Luckily, Terrence Riggins is both a masterful actor and a truly gifted storyteller. On what he calls “the unlikeliest of stages,” he toggles through these modes nearly effortlessly, no doubt indebted to the direction of Cheyenne Barboza. In the “present,” Riggins possesses such a deep rawness it is immediately captivating. When he reads out the text from his page, Riggins summons words so beautiful they immediately crystallize into poetry. And when the play surges into theatrical metaphor, Riggins remains committed, seriously contending with what could be easily read as comical.
The connective tissue of the play, getting us from scene to scene, is a series of “triggers.” The most organic are the interruptions of quotidian prison life, which, through a subtle lighting change (designed by Joseph Fonseca) and a jarring sound cue (designed by Finn Wiggins-Henry), tear Riggins away from his performative fantasy. In the opposite direction, however, is where things become a little more contrived. For example, there’s a moment where Riggins turns to see a portrait of his childhood crush, Pauline, projected on the wall (designed by Hannah Tran). Riggins directly addresses the picture, launching into a monologue of childhood crushes and budding thespianism. The anecdote is as beautifully written as ever; how we get there feels less seamless.
I’ll admit that I initially looked at the full title of the play, Unbecoming Tragedy: A Ritual Journey Towards Destiny, as being a touch melodramatic. Ultimately, I was proven wrong. The stakes of this play are deep, delving into and depicting the harsh realities of addiction, Black identity, and incarceration. These struggles are indeed life or death, scaling upwards to the dramas of destiny.
The most compelling aspect of this play, in my opinion, is its relationship to performance itself. It’s not just about theater as metaphor, or ritual, but as exorcism. That the play’s cathartic climax is the play at its most unabashedly theatrical is no coincidence; rather, in a play often defined by limitation, it ultimately finds transcendence through the limitless potential of theater.
I’ll end my praises of Unbecoming Tragedy with an aside, albeit a heartfelt one: I regard Terrence Riggins as something of a hometown hero. He is someone who has grown up in New Haven, and spent years developing this work with community-based theatre troupe Collective Consciousness Theatre and Long Wharf. To watch any world premiere is a gift; to have one so molded by the New Haven community is truly a blessing.
