Firestorm

Jada Suzanne Dixon as Gaby and Timothy McCracken as Patrick Photo: George Lange

Patrick (Timothy McCracken) is running for Governor of Ohio. He is well-positioned to take the prize: he's assembled a top-notch team, including his powerhouse and resourceful assistant Leslie (Iona Leighton); and his wife, Gaby (Jada Suzanne Dixon), an African-American attorney. But a fraternity hazing incident in college comes back to haunt him in the person of Jamal (Maduka Steady).

Friedman has deftly tightened and trimmed the play since its reading at LOCAL last year and its two other recent premieres, and the story packs a punch! Ultimately, we witness that whites, educated or not, generally have no clue regarding the black experience in America, which we see with Patrick's behavior towards both Jamal and Gaby at different times in his life.

Iona Leighton as Leslie Photo: George Lange

McCracken crackles as the high-powered gubernatorial candidate, totally focused on strategic split-second decisions, yet not missing a beat with Gaby or Leslie in their repartee. Even in Patrick's darkest hour, McCracken summons the same deep determination and focus that brought Patrick's candidacy this far, thus delivering a strong, yet difficult catharsis that has in it the potential for white privilege overcoming itself, providing a glimmer of hope, as Patrick faces the bright lights, just as the curtain falls.

As we have seen with the recent damaging email threads from the State Department and the Democratic National Committee, which were delivered to WikiLeaks from whistleblowers inside both organizations), and how this story got buried beneath a continuing scripted data dump of Trump's lurid behavior, campaign managers are a tough bunch with lots of tricks up their sleeve to keep their candidates viable. Leighton's Leslie sizzles. She is sharp as a tack, always on top of the situation, no matter how dire, and does well to hide her emotional attachments, until ...

Maduka Steady as Jamal Photo: George Lange

Below Gaby's upper-middle class upbringing, Dixon finds an unspoken subtext that comes to the fore with an intensity that is both natural and painful, for the memories it brings up, much as Steady achieves in a single scene, with Jamal's nuanced dalliance with Patrick that eventually builds to a pointed climax, amplified by its understatement.

Rudnick stages the action in-the-round, mimicking the whirlwind world of politics, with a slight articulation of the orientation of each setting as they reappear, as if physically racheting up spacetime in parallel to the coiled events and bubbling emotions that spring forth in this cautionary tale. The choreographed segues for the settings by the stagehands got their own round of applause on opening night.

Timothy McCracken as Patrick and Jada Suzanne Dixon as Gaby Photo: George Lange

While there has been a lot of talk in the past few years regarding #blacklivesmatter, Friedman digs deep and finds a way to dramatize this and bring it home, in both a personal and political way. What we do to each other and to the world in each and every moment has repercussions and reverberations. At some level, there is always a remembrance and an effect, until we are able to achieve forgiveness and evolve.

LOCAL Theater Company's world premiere of Firestorm, by Meridith Friedman runs through November 13th. For tickets: localtheatercompany.org.

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