Homesteaders ‘Flyin’ West’ to Build the Future

The remnants of Nicodemus, Kan.--at one point the largest all-black town west of the Mississippi--were officially preserved as a national historic site last year. Pearl Cleage’s play “Flyin’ West” is, without a doubt, the new park’s best promotional vehicle.

Set on a farm just outside Nicodemus a century ago, “Flyin’ West” has been one of the more widely produced plays in America recently. Shirley Jo Finney’s staging, which opened Sunday at the Pasadena Playhouse, demonstrates why the play is popular, but a few problems are also evident.

Cleage’s main characters are at a crossroads for the aspirations of women as well as of African Americans. The central household consists of three female homesteaders who came west together. Fannie (Tina Lifford) and Minnie (Ariyan Johnson) are biological sisters; Sophie (Michele Shay), who joined the household several years prior after she started doing the laundry, is biracial, yet more suspicious of whites than any of the others.

When the women arrived in Kansas, long before the play begins, they befriended a neighbor, old Miss Leah (Michelle Davison), a former slave who serves as a mother surrogate and now lives with them. She tells stories from the days of slavery, including the grisly details about how her 10 children were conceived as merchandise, in a forced breeding system, and then sold.

As the winter of 1898-99 approaches, gentle Fannie and hard-as-nails Sophie await the return of the younger Minnie with her pretentious husband, Frank (Tony Colitti), a biracial poet who hopes to inherit part of his late white father’s New Orleans estate. Frank and Minnie have been living in London since their wedding--he has “passed” for white. Meanwhile, Fannie has a local beau, the dark and gallant Wil Parish (Darryl Alan Reed).

The narrative is fueled primarily by the distaste that the visiting Frank has for blacks and for Nicodemus, and by the revelation that he’s an ogre in the way he treats his pregnant wife. Simultaneously, Sophie is trying to convince her neighbors to preserve Nicodemus as a black enclave by refusing to sell their property to unseen white speculators.

The play paints a bracing portrait of formerly oppressed women, gathered in an improvised family in place of the splintered slave families, trying to create a new world for themselves. When the talk is broken by the spell of a ritual that the three women perform to commemorate their arrival in Nicodemus, accompanied by Mitchell Greenhill’s quietly propulsive music, their determination is inspiring.

Cleage also brings up biracial issues and intrarace prejudice against darker-skinned individuals, but not very skillfully. We never learn enough about Sophie’s past to comprehend why her attitudes are so black-leaning in contrast to the white-leaning Frank. We can imagine why Frank evolved the way he did, but we don’t understand why he married small-town Minnie. And Cleage’s decision to make Frank a wife beater--though it may engender reflections on the relationship between domestic abuse and institutional racism--stacks the deck against him; the play’s implied invitation to simply hiss him off the stage lowers the level of the discussion.

The narrative is slow to start, poking around unnecessary details about the subsidiary character of Wil. It also includes an unlikely turn when Sophie and Fannie give Minnie the deed to her share of the property without much expressed trepidation over what the despised Frank might do, once he smells his wife’s new wealth and the speculators’ offers.

However, the story ends with a surprising twist that provides a grimly amusing shock, like something out of a folk tale. This is such an enterprising development that earlier problems might be forgotten.

Davison’s Miss Leah handles this moment like a wise old magician, and Lifford’s previously syrupy Fannie steels herself and joins the macabre game. The other actors are more constrained by the schematic quality of their roles.

In a sense, the play is missing its most potentially dramatic chapter: the women’s flight and arrival in Kansas. Perhaps a tighter, less naturalistic approach to storytelling might have provided room in an admittedly long evening to encompass that earlier declaration of independence as well as this later melodrama.

* “Flyin’ West,” Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 5 and 9 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Feb. 21. $13.50-$42.50. (800) 233-3123. Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes.

Michele Shay: Sophie Washington

Michelle Davison: Miss Leah

Tina Lifford: Fannie Dove

Darryl Alan Reed: Wil Parish

Ariyan Johnson: Minnie Dove Charles

Tony Colitti: Frank Charles

Written by Pearl Cleage. Directed by Shirley Jo Finney. Sets by Gary Wissmann. Lighting by Victor En Yu Tan. Costumes by Dana Rebecca Woods. Sound and music by Mitchell Greenhill. Production stage manager Ed De Shae.