At Miners Alley, ‘Fairfield’ pushes every race button to hilarious effect
Eric Coble’s play about an elementary school in a liberal suburb trying to navigate the minefield of Black History Month is a crash-and-burn comedy where no one gets out alive. By the end of the show, the school motto — “Peace, Love, Respect for All” — is all but trampled into the ground as the parents and administrators strip off the veneer of PC civility and “appropriate” language and let their worst thoughts fly.
It shouldn’t have been that way. The show kicks off with Mrs. Wadley (a pitch-perfect Sheryl McCallum) as the school principal informing the assembled students about a reasonable-sounding plan to celebrate Black History Month. She’s only a minute in before she makes her first mini-gaffe, and we soon see Coble’s premise begin to appear: It’s impossible to talk about race at any length without putting your foot in your mouth at some point. The question is whether you can recover and correct quickly enough to continue moving ahead.
In Fairfield, the answer is an unequivocal “no” — and that’s where all the funny lies. In this production at Miners Alley Playhouse in Golden, director Jada Suzanne Dixon (a Curious Theatre regular making her directorial debut) takes an all-star cast and a wickedly clever script and delivers a high-impact, delightfully offensive night of theater. No slur is unflung, no racial epithet forgotten, and no opportunity to say the wrong thing missed.
The beauty of Coble’s script is how well he places the mines. It’s easy to see, in most cases, how anyone could have stepped on one or two of them.
But these characters step on all of them.
An ambitious plan
Principal Wadley’s primary cross to bear comes in the form of first-year first-grade teacher Laurie Kaminski. She’s played brilliantly by Adeline Mann as an agent of chaos disguised as a sweet, eager-to-please educator who just wants to do the right thing. When Wadley takes a look at her lesson plan for Black History Month, she notes that the word-find game contains gems like “chitlins,” “watermelon” and “fried chicken” — and that she wants to take a stab at “Roots” with her 6-year-olds.
It’s easy enough to scuttle “Roots,” but the word list has already gone home with the kiddies. And aren’t those actually cultural foods for African Americans? Well, yes, but …
Kaminski digs the hole yet deeper when, during a free-flowing discourse on evolution to her (unseen) class, she draws a line between our common ancestors in Africa to her own very white self and then to the monkeys we all sorta came from and she’s not saying African Americans are monkeys but …
And then there’s a role-playing game the zealous Miss Kaminski initiates where some of the kids portray slaves and the other slaveholders.
What could possibly go wrong?
As the audience groans and laughs at each progressive gaffe, we can already hear in our minds the phone calls into the principal’s office.
Representing the black parents are Kristina Fountaine and Sinjin Jones as Vanessa and Daniel Stubbs. They’ve moved their son to the Fairfield school district in hopes of a better education, but before long they’re confronting the fallout from the role-playing exercise: Their son has been called the n-word by a white kid, and then symbolically whipped with paper clips.
Holy shit.
On the other side of the stage are Scott and Molly Flemmingsen (Brian Landis Folkins and MacKenzie Beyer), white parents who’ve made the sacrifice to send little Austin to Fairfield (rather than the private school) so he could get a little diversity. While Scott notes that Austin was just playing along with the exercise the teacher assigned (and wasn’t that paper-clip whip creative?), Molly is utterly freaked out that her little angel could have used the n-word.
Dixon does nice work playing these parents back and forth, and it’s fascinating (and very funny) to see how white parents and black parents react to the same information.
These are all tremendous performances, with Dixon helping the actors find a lot of great little moments that add to the comedy and consternation.
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Release the Folkins
Brian Landis Folkins is great as the dipshit dad with the spiked hair, but he really shines when he puts on a terrible wig and glasses and plays Wadley’s boss, Superintendent Snyder. Another Curious regular, Folkins is up for a Best Actor Henry Award this year for his outstanding performance in Church and State at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. As the superintendent in Fairfield, he’s tasked with spelling things out for Wadley so she fully understands the peril they’re all in.
When the shit hits the fan, he tells her he’d love to just fire her but, dang it, the district doesn’t have many people of color in leadership positions — and maybe that’s kinda why he hired her. Later, when things really go off the rails, Folkins is hilarious as he sputters and storms and points out that Wadley’s efforts at the school have resulted in an “equal-opportunity clusterfuck.”
Jones also gets another role, donning a gray wig and adopting a limp to play Charles Clark, an aging Black Panther invited to address the school about black history. We can assume Principal Wadley didn’t know about that particular resume item when she invited him, but she soon learns about it with the rest of the school when his address quickly devolves into a rant about oppression and the white man. He may even have said “honky” — no one’s quite sure — but he definitely yells “motherfuckers.”
That’s gonna make the phone ring!
Fairfield ends with the sweetly devious Miss Kaminski putting together yet another school assembly with all the students and parents to work things out. “Downhill fast” is the best way to describe the results, and by the time the lights go down on the second act, one can only conclude that the only way forward for the school district would be to burn dear Fairfield Elementary to the ground and start over.
Although it’s got plenty of laughs, Fairfield is also a good lesson in how fraught race relations still are in the U.S. The conceit here by the parents and educators that we’re in a post-race period where “Peace, Love, Respect for all” is truly doable is contradicted by facts on the ground. At the same time, Coble seems to point out that communication, and lack thereof, really can be the true sticking point. As we look at the two sets of parents in Fairfield, it’s easy to see they pretty much want the same thing.
It’s getting there together that’s the trouble.
