Pressure-cooker family dramedy rounds out Arvada Center repertory season in fine form
Stick Fly is the last of the Arvada Center’s three repertory shows this season, and it may well be the best. That’s a high bar, since Animal Farm and The Liar are both excellent, but there’s something about Stick Fly that just hits on every cylinder.
This one is beautifully directed by Jada Suzane Dixon, who has her hands full with a relatively complex script that, while it treads familiar ground in the dysfunctional-family-on-vacation realm, also dabbles in race, classism, sexism, inequality and just plain bad behavior. Even with all that, it’s quite funny in places, with the family members’ love for each other popping out between the mayhem.
Lydia R. Diamond’s play is set in 2005 on Martha’s Vineyard. In an opulent summer home owned by a Black family, we first meet the younger, not-so-successful son Spoon (Lavour Addison) and his fiancée Taylor (Constance Swain). At the house getting things ready is Cheryl (Kristina Fountaine), who at first looks like the help but is soon revealed to be someone with a lot more stake in this family.
Older brother Flip (Ryan George), a wealthy plastic surgeon, is on pins and needles about introducing his new, ultra-white girlfriend Kimber (Noelia Antweiler) to his father Joe (Abner Genece).
What follows is a slowly building reveal of tortured relationships, family secrets, new twists to work out and a glaringly absent mother figure whose presence is only seen (but unheard) in phone calls.
Stick Fly takes the old Biff-n-Buffy at the Vineyard trope and turns it on its ear. And while some of the rocks turned over may be more specific to a Black family, much of it is common ground for family members of any race, ethnicity or time period. We’re all nuts, but money does seem to fuel a particularly interesting variety of crazy.
It’s Taylor, an entomologist busily collecting specimens amidst the tumult, who gives us the metaphor in the title: house flies have to be glued to popsicle sticks to study up close, given their frenetic activity. Each of the characters gets their own scrutiny under the magnifying glass as they all essentially take turns baring their souls and spilling their guts.
Only Kimber remains mostly above the fray, with Diamond writing her as an entitled white woman who nevertheless has a firm — and ultimately believable — understanding of what Black and brown people face in life from her work in “the inner city.” I was half expecting Kimber to be a shrinking violet, so self-conscious of her melanin-challenged body that she’d drowned out by this bombastic Black family. But when Taylor goes off on her during a game of Trivial Pursuit, Kimber holds her ground and, remarkably, seems to remain largely unoffended. Antweiler is a powerful force onstage and a well-grounded actor, and it takes that kind of brio to portray Kimber as Diamond no doubt intended: as a totem to the other characters’ perceptions about white people while also appearing as a mirror of sorts.
That’s not to say that the characters are going around saying they don’t see color, but as the multiple plot points barrel toward their conclusion, much of the Sturm und Drang about race, money, class and the like falls away as a larger, more immediate elephant in the room comes into play.
So many nice performances are brought out under Dixon’s direction. As Taylor, Constance Swain is a little ball of energy that never stops, and she moves from being on the periphery at first to the central character who best represents everyone else. As bold as she is unsure of herself, as smart as she is at times clueless, Taylor is portrayed by Swain with enormous authority. It’s hard to imagine another actor playing this role.
As Spoon, Addison is challenged to move the character from the man who shrinks into a boy around his father to someone ready to stand up and take his place. It’s a bit of a cliché that the profession looked down upon by the father is writer, but Addison does a nice job as the emotional center and perhaps sanest of the lot.
Fountaine has been in all three of these productions, and while it’d be hard to top her impressive twins act in The Liar, she fully inhabits the simmering, then exploding character of Cheryl. She may just be filling in for her grandma, the family’s longtime maid, but it’s clear from the get-go that the recent grad from an elite NYC high school is nobody’s fool. If there is a “main fly” in Stick Fly, she’s the one: always buzzing around and never stopping long enough to finish a thought or fully answer a question.
Until, that is, she’s finally super-glued to her own inescapable stick.
Ryan George is spot-on as the skirt-chasing bachelor who may just have met his match with Kimber. He’s dad’s clear favorite, and Genece is merciless as the father who says the mean parts out loud to Spoon.
Stick Fly comes in at about two-and-a-half hours with the intermission, but it never wears out its welcome. It’s one of those plays that’s much more than the sum of its parts, so well-acted and directed as to transcend the stories to leave the audience with a feel, a familiarity and abundant empathy for the family we just got to know so well.
Hats off to the Black Box Repertory Theatre and Lynne Collins, artistic director of plays, for a bangup season. All three of these shows are up now and run into late May. Don’t miss them!
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