Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Liza Jessie Peterson’s urgent THE PECULIAR PATRIOT grapples with mass incarceration with grit, humor, and heart

• By drediman
• July 28, 2018
• No Comments

Liza Jessie Peterson in “The Peculiar Patriot” at the National Black Theatre, a co-production with Hi-Arts.

Last night, I made the trek uptown to Harlem to catch one of the final performances of the return engagement of Liza Jessie Peterson’s The Peculiar Patriot at the National Black Theatre, a co-production with Hi-Arts. The piece joins Notes from the Field, Anna Deavere Smith’s eye-opening docudrama about the school-to-prison pipeline, as an important work of theater that urgently raises awareness about this country’s troubling mass incarceration problem. What’s interesting is that both happen to be searing one-woman shows, as well.

Ms. Peterson, who wrote and stars in the piece, is a truly compelling presence. She conjures fully-fledged characters out of thin air with ease and command. Ms. Peterson mostly plays one Betsy Laquanda Ross, a feisty woman who’s life has been impacted and shaped by the imprisonment of some of the most important people in her life – her father, her on-again-off-again boyfriend, and her best friend. Even though the play is only loosely based on real events, it’s most effective when it brings its characters’ affecting, quirky personal stories to empathetic life. It’s a bit less convincing as theater, however, when it attempts to spouts facts and figures about the system and convey a strict political perspective. The stories in themselves are political, and the drama is more palpable when Ms. Peterson’s play isn’t being didactic.

The production is smoothly directed by Talvin Wilks, who does a very fine job at accommodating Ms. Peterson’s often ravishing poetic flights of fancy and constantly shifting moods and points of view. This is in large part due to the set and lighting design by Maruti Evans, which immerses the audience into Betsy’s unstable world with both specificity and theatrical flare. Although I do have minor reservations about the play (as described above), I believe that The Peculiar Patriot is an important piece of political theater with an urgent message that is in dire need of being heard, and Ms. Peterson’s performance communicates it with astonishing humor, grit, and heart.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

THE PECULIAR PATRIOT
Off-Broadway, Play
National Black Theatre and Hi-Arts
1 hour, 30 minutes (without an intermission)
Through July 29