Strawberry — What Party?
Marygrove Theatre
8425 W McNichols Rd.
Detroit, Mich.
April 19, 2025
If you were going to tell the story about a mysterious death, where would you start? Maybe at the time of death, or earlier in the person’s life to show a bright future snuffed out by unfortunate circumstances. Strawberry — What Party does neither.
The play, written by former Free Press and Detroit News columnist Carol Teegardin, is supposed to explore what happened to Tamara Greene, a young mother and exotic dancer known as Strawberry who was killed after working a party at the Manoogian Mansion under disgraced Detroit Mayor Kwame Kiplatrick.
Admittedly, the story is complicated as it was never proven that the party — or the alleged confrontation with Kwame’s former wife Carlita attacking Greene with a bat when she caught her giving Kilpatrick a lap dance — actually happened. Greene was killed in a drive-by shooting months later. The play is based on Teegarden’s 2011 book Strawberry: How an Exotic Dancer Toppled Detroit’s Hip-Hop Mayor, and first premiered in 2017. It came back to Detroit with four performances this month at the Marygrove Theatre.
Rather than starting with Greene (death or otherwise), the production opens with a bizarre monologue by Kilpatrick played by the charismatic Roosevelt Johnson in an orange jumpsuit. It then jarringly cuts to scenes of a police officer discovering Greene’s body, Kilpatrick’s inauguration, and steamy text messages between him and his chief of staff Christine Beatty.
It includes nods to all the strangeness of Kilpatrick’s mayoral run, including being dubbed the “hip-hop mayor,” his parents advising him to stop wearing the diamond earring that he caught so much flack for, his absurd speeches claiming that he doesn’t lie, and his wife’s Lincoln Navigator that was leased with city funds. We even get an aside from Beatty, played timidly by Aesha Gambrell, expressing guilt for smiling in Carlita’s face while sleeping with her husband. What does any of this have to do with Greene’s death and the party that may or may not have led up to it?
Just as in real life, everyone seems to want to forget about Tamara “Strawberry” Greene. She feels like an afterthought rather than the focal point, which is odd for a play named after her. It’s unfortunate, as Autumn Russell did a beautiful job portraying her. She had maybe 20 minutes of stage time total. I wanted to see more of her.
This play was a missed opportunity to humanize this young woman. I left wanting to know more about who Tamara was. What were her hopes and dreams and how did her life circumstances pave the road for her to become a dancer who ended up working a Manoogian Mansion party? How did her death affect her family and what do they have to say about it? The play glances over these details with a glazed look in the eyes.
It felt all over the place, from the Microsoft Word Clip Art timestamps projected onstage (which most productions don’t need because the actors and the set do the job of establishing where and when the action is taking place) to the dollar-store tablecloths and music that was sometimes louder than the actors.
Even with decent acting, the actors can only work with the material they are given, and the writing failed them with dialogue that often felt unnatural. There were no real beats in the play, sometimes leaving the actors in an awkward silence after what should have been an impactful moment.
Small details broke the fourth wall that triggered my brain to remember that I was watching actors, taking away the magic of live theatre. Police officers picked up bullets that weren’t there and the curtains got caught on the furniture when changing scenes. When Kilpatrick and Beatty were reading their text messages to each other (also projected in that awful Clip Art font), their dialogue didn’t match the text on screen.
After the play, my colleagues and I came up with names that would have been better suited for the play: “The Rise and Fall of Kwame Kilpatrick, ” “The Hip-Hop Mayor,” or “What the Fuck Was Kwame Thinking: A Soap Opera in Two Acts.” I’m still waiting to know more about Tamara Greene and wishing people would stop reducing her to a dancer named Strawberry.
This review was published in partnership with Detroit Metro Times.
