Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Holder’s seemingly old-fashioned TOO HEAVY FOR YOUR POCKET is a worthwhile new play

• By drediman
• October 16, 2017
• No Comments

Eboni Fowers and Nneka Okafor in “Too Heavy for Your Pocket” at Roundabout Underground.

Yesterday I caught a matinee performance of Jiréh Breon Holder’s Too Heavy for Your Pocket, in a co-production between Roundabout Underground (Roundabout’s successful developmental programming arm) and Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre, at the Black Box Theatre at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre. This new play takes place in early 1960s Nashville and concerns two lower middle class couples as they face domestic struggles in the face of the more panoramic and intensifying – and often confusing (particularly in the days before widespread news coverage, let alone social media) – conflicts of this nation’s Civil Rights Movement.

On the surface, Mr. Holder’s voice may seem far more traditional than his fellow young contemporary African American playwrights, which include the likes of the trailblazing Tarell Alvin McCraney, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and Robert O’Hara, to name a few. Indeed, the first few scenes of Too Heavy for Your Pocket play like your typical kitchen sink drama. But look closer and you’ll see a young talent eager to examine, at least in this play, a time and place we thought we knew (i.e., the Civil Rights Movement) from a fresh perspective. Eventually, the play bravely asks the question of whether the price of social progress is worth the domestic disappointments and heartbreaks it leaves in its wake. The answer may leave you unsettled. This is interesting stuff.

Director Margot Bordelon, in my mind, handles Mr. Holder’s play a tad too preciously for its own good. Too Heavy for Your Pocket has   a strong enough backbone for a grittier, less delicate staging – especially with a cast as strong as this one. The production’s quartet of actors – Eboni Flowers, Hampton Fluker, Brandon Gill, Nneka Okafor – are all superb, acting with touching depth and nuance. They don’t need the heightened theatricality.

RECOMMENDED

TOO HEAVY FOR YOUR POCKET
Off-Broadway, Play
Roundabout Underground at the Black Box Theatre at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
2 hours, 10 minutes (with one intermission)
Through November 19