Play displays "Funnyhouse" of a Black girl's mind.

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Author: Armstrong, Linda1

"Funnyhouse of a Negro," performed by the Classical Theatre of Harlem at the Harlem School of the Arts at 645 St. Nicholas Avenue, will leave you confused and dangling. It is a production that looks at the last hours of a Black girl named Sarah before she is driven to end her life by characters that torment her.

Sarah is a Black girl so uncomfortable with having kinky hair or anything that connects her with being Black that she refuses to even leave her room. Instead, she stays inside and creates a world of her own, one where she is miserable and fantasizes that she speaks with Queen Victoria.

For most of the play, we watch her and five characters, females who have white faces, sharing the bizarre thoughts that go through her mind. She recounts her thoughts about her mother being raped by a Black man and her being the product of this, then of her mother losing her mind and being put away. She speaks of her father's mother sending a dead chicken to her parents' wedding. She tells of how her Black grandmother wanted her father to be a missionary in Africa and, in a Christ-like way, save the Black man, a mission he failed. She talks of wanting to live in a world with European antiques.

Her ideal world is a white world. She imagines a world devoid of Black people.

The production consists of hearing her feelings on these different matters repeated by her and the characters she has made up in her mind who are her companions and tormentors. All in all, it's disturbing to watch.

During the course of the hour-long production, which runs with no intermission, we are told that Sarah's father hanged himself. Sarah and her characters convey the wild activity of her mind while a white woman, who is the landlord of her building, tries to keep the audience abreast of the truth â€" but even her truth is confusing.

In the end when all these characters come together and converge on Sarah, yelling and pushing, it's no wonder that she gives up and chooses death. This production just leaves the audience with a lot of questions.

Written by Adrienne Kennedy and directed by Billie Allen, the production plays through February 12.

While the cast of actors, lead by Suzette Gunn as Sarah and featuring Elena McGee, Trish McCall, Monica Stith, Danny Camiel, Willie E. Teacher and Kellie McCants, gave solid performances, it was the material that was unsettling.

PHOTO (COLOR): A scene from "Funnyhouse of a Negro"

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By Linda Armstrong, Special to the AmNews