Mr. Joy

Play
by Daniel Beaty

With Tangela Large

Mr. Joy, an unseen character, is an elderly Chinese man who runs a shoe repair shop in Harlem. A young girl (expertly played by Tangela Large, as are all the characters), talks about how great it is to hang out with him and to learn about repairing shoes. She’s animated, full of stories, rhymes and brimming with vitality.

The scene shifts to her grandmother, reflecting mournfully on violence in the community, and then to a young man caught up in gangs. After that appears a young transsexual, and then her father, a successful lawyer not happy with that choice. There are a raft of other characters as well.

All the parts are woven together with Beaty’s ingenuity and Large’s incredible dramatic range, each leading out the next to tell an amalgamated but coherent story from an array of perspectives.

Without dropping a beat, Large moves from one to another, capturing the speech, mannerisms and spirit of each with sensitivity and expertise. It is a phenomenal performance, and builds to a heartrending conclusion.

Playwright Daniel Beaty has constructed a concise but variegated narrative that drives its drama to the core of its dozen or so characters and creates a vivid world out of all of them. It’s hard to believe that Large pulls this off and that the enactment of this complicated landscape of social interactions consumes only an hour and a half.

There is something reminiscent in Anna Deveare Smith’s signature performance in Fires In the Mirror (1992) which played at the American Repertory Theatre over two decades ago. The text of that show was transcribed from recorded interviews with participants in the 1991 conflicts involving Orthodox Jews and African-Americans in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Alternatively, Mr. Joy is a fiction, but Large’s astonishing range in playing an array of characters brings Smith’s equivalently versatile and memorable performance to mind.

-BADMan