Review: ‘Josephine’s Feast’ breaks women and mothers free of their shackles
Jasmine Milan Williams, left, Margo Hall and Tre’Vonne Bell in “Josephine’s Feast” at Magic Theatre at Fort Mason in San Francisco.
If you’re a woman with a family, you can’t simply be a human. You must be a mother, wife, sister or daughter first. Have a vision, feel an impulse, pursue a change, embark on your hero’s journey, and the world stops you short, asking, “But what about your kids? Your partner?”
One of the twin achievements of “Josephine’s Feast,” whose world premiere opened Saturday, Aug. 5, at Magic Theatre in a coproduction with Campo Santo, is to break its heroine free of those shackles. Matriarch Josephine (Margo Hall) describes children Lexx (Britney Frazier) and Amaya (Jasmine Milan William) as her captors. “They expect me to remain here frozen in time like some monument to their childhood,” she says at the birthday dinner she’s organized to make a big announcement.
The play’s other grand achievement is to show just how far Lexx and Amaya — and by extension the rest of us — will go to keep that monument stuck in place.
From left: Britney Frazier, Tierra Allen and Jasmine Milan Williams in “Josephine’s Feast,” which runs through Sunday, Aug. 20, at Magic Theatre at Fort Mason.
To get there, playwright and San Francisco native Star Finch enacts a structural breed of freedom, in unburdening the script of the constraints of realism. Weird things happen in “Josephine’s Feast,” which is set in San Francisco at the height of the pandemic. First there’s the eerie green tint to the sky, which weighs heavily on Josephine’s home in Tanya Orellana’s canny set design. Then there’s the way the electricity snaps off at an argument’s climax, sending shock waves through all the bodies onstage as if some great but unspoken barrier has been broken.
Directed by Ellen Sebastian Chang, the ground of this world — resembling but not identical to ours — still feels a bit shaky. When the family first convenes, and everyone’s on his or her phone, it’s as if the actors still haven’t made and owned that cut-through-the-bog choice that instantly clarifies what someone is doing and why. The characters are idle, yes, but that doesn’t mean the artists can’t have crisply defined intentions within that idleness.
Jasmine Milan Williams, left, Tre’Vonne Bell and Britney Frazier in “Josephine’s Feast,” written by San Francisco native Star Finch and directed by Ellen Sebastian Chang.
And one character, Lexx, raises questions that nag, despite Frazier’s self-possessed, knifelike performance. Although Lexx is a progressive lesbian academic, she keeps demanding that her mother adhere to traditional gender roles. Such hypocrisy is not far-fetched, of course, but it feels like a missed opportunity or an imbalance that neither her nitpicking, argumentative family nor the play calls her out on in a way that forces her to reckon.
When Lexx goes after Josephine, ridiculing her dreams, she seethes with a vindictiveness, perhaps even a hate, that surprises the other characters. Some backstory must have dug that chip on her shoulder, but Lexx’s character arc doesn’t trace all the way to an answer.
Britney Frazier plays Lexx, a progressive lesbian academic who keeps demanding that her mother adhere to traditional gender roles, in “Josephine’s Feast.”
But then there’s the sheer joy of Finch’s dialogue. She makes music of trash talk. Each spicy little insult is colloquial yet poetic, conjuring a whole life of specific choices and the worldview that made them. You can’t unhear remarks such as “Light-skinned dudes look like thumbs,” or that one young man’s pants are so tight that “he might end up with a yeast infection.” When Amaya and Lexx razz each other, pitting high-femme romantic melodrama against low-key butch literalism, you might want the scene to last forever, or at least spin off into a TV series.
Here, Bay Area treasure Hall (“Blindspotting”), who always goes for broke, charts still more new artistic territory. Her line readings divine the melody in a text, and her focus clarifies an entire room. When Josephine can’t take it any more, Hall finds a vocal register that sounds like it’s clinging to the edge of a cliff; when she unleashes her fury, she becomes a cannon.
Margo Hall stars as the title character in “Josephine’s Feast,” in which she plays a matriarch who describes her children as her captors.
Later, when Josephine wonders how things got this way, she hypothesizes, “Maybe because our mothers did the same.” Finch’s play channels generations of mothers’ rage. It gives that feeling a platform, an airing, which breaks its cage apart. The feeling is then transmuted. A door opens. A new world beckons.
Reach Lily Janiak: [email protected]
“Josephine’s Feast”: Written by Star Finch. Directed by Ellen Sebastian Chang. Through Sunday, Aug. 20. One hour, 45 minutes. $30-$70. Magic Theatre, Fort Mason, 2 Marina Blvd., Building D, Third Floor, S.F. 415-441-8822. www.magictheatre.org
Lily Janiak joined the San Francisco Chronicle as theater critic in May 2016. Previously, her writing appeared in Theatre Bay Area, American Theatre, SF Weekly, the Village Voice and HowlRound. She holds a BA in theater studies from Yale and an MA in drama from San Francisco State.
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