When the play opens with the infamous “To be or not to be…” you start to think time is out of joint. Or maybe that you’ve just misremembered how Hamlet starts? You ever look at one of those maps of the United States where all the states have been shoved around into different spaces in the outline but it still mostly looks like the outline of the country even though everything is all discombobulated?
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And somewhere between days two and six he created Signature Theatre way down in Shirlington, Virginia. And now, after thousands of years of watching the world filled with stupid humans do their worst, the almighty has deigned us meager mortals worthy of a visit— inside the Ark Theatre (because even God isn’t big enough to beat out A Little Night Music starring Bobby Smith next door in The Max)— because he’s come to set the record straight.
One thing stood out to me as I entered the Kennedy Center Family Theater to see Darius & Twig, the Kennedy Center’s contribution to the ongoing Women’s Voices Theater Festival and an adaptation by Caleen Sinnette Jennings of Walter Dean Myers’ award-winning novel.
“One person can only do so much.”
These words, spray-painted graffiti-style across Andrew Cohen’s evocative set, immediately set the tone for the entire performance.
Where do you find your place in the world? And how easy can it be to do so when you’re trying to put together the puzzle pieces of your own life while the world around you falls apart? Imagine such a conundrum. Now imagine it in 1962, as a young African-American girl growing up in Queens, and going to a private charter school in Greenwich Village, as Malcolm X is shot, President Kennedy is assassinated,