A Reflective “Sunset Baby” Dawns Off Broadway

Theatre is a mirror, but for what? We quote “Hamlet,” saying that performance should hold a “mirror up to nature”; in an interview, the playwright Dominique Morisseau cited Nina Simone, who said that an artist’s duty is “to reflect the times.” Nature, right; the times, of course—the theatre should reflect those things. But a play might also be positioned to show us the person who wrote it. In “Sunset Baby,” now at the Off Broadway Pershing Square Signature Center, Morisseau, best known for her play cycle, “The Detroit Project,” invites us to look at the fraught final encounters between a woman and her activist father. When Nina (Moses Ingram) was five years old, her dad, the Black Power revolutionary Kenyatta (Russell Hornsby), went to prison for an attempted armored-truck heist—to “steal capitalist dollars in the name of Third World democracy,” Nina sneers—and her once renegade mother dwindled into heartbreak and, eventually, addiction and early death. Now Nina is grown and making her own violent way, along with her boyfriend, Damon (J. Alphonse Nicholson). Together they think of themselves as Bonnie and Clyde, gun-toting tricksters who lure men into drug deals and rob them. Nina and Damon don’t want radical liberation; they want ten thousand dollars. That stash will finally let them escape East New York for Paris or London or some other beautiful place that Nina has fallen in love with via the Travel Channel. Nina—named for the play’s tutelary spirit, Simone—spends a great deal of “Sunset Baby” staring into a mirror, dressing for her part in these crimes, pulling her thigh-high electric-blue boots on and off, and making herself up to the point of unrecognizability. Ingram, who swung a lightsabre in the TV show “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” seems infinitely more tired here: her shoulders slump; her eyes, their lids painted peacock green, often drift nearly shut. Nina does have several stashes of treasure, however, that she hasn’t told Damon about. Most important is a trove of letters that her mother left behind, written but never sent to her lover in prison; now that Kenyatta is out, he’s desperate to […]

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