Broadbend, Arkansas – The Duke on 42nd Street, New York

Danyel Fulton in Broadbend, Arkansas at The Duke on 42nd Street, New York. Picture: Carol Rosegg

Broadbend, Arkansas continues at The Duke on 42nd Street, New York until 23 November 2019.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Broadbend, Arkansas is a new, intimate Off-Broadway musical with big scope. Focusing on just two members of an African-American family, it crystallises the humiliations, pain and violence of the enduring whirlwind of racism in 20th century America.

The show is graced with rich, seductive music by Ted Shen, also credited with additional lyrics. In selections that go from brief bursts of feeling to extended narratives, the music is often redolent of the great blues-inflected standards of yesteryear (think Harold Arlen), played gorgeously by the strings, reeds and piano of the six-piece orchestra conducted by Deborah Abramson at the piano.

With lyrics comfortably set into the text, it’s sung beautifully by the cast of two, Justin Cunningham and Danyel Fulton, who deliver deeply felt, expertly acted performances.

The only problem is that the sleekly handsome production, directed with feeling by Jack Cummings III, may simply ask too much of its grandly talented cast of two to fully deliver the visceral impact intended. With the exception of the show’s final moments, their turns on stage are almost completely monologues.

In addition to the heavy musicality, they have exposition to relate or detailed scenes to play with characters who aren’t there, sometimes delivering their dialogue, and are kept busy moving about the stage to indicate changes in beats.

The material itself is so emotional and packed it can use the byplay between actors to really register. With just one actor on stage most of the time, with no scenery to speak of and backed by very visible musicians upstage (bathed in hypnotic chiaroscuro lighting by Jen Schriever) the thought that this is a performance – rather than a suspension of disbelief – often lingers somewhere in the background. The show takes on the aura of a chamber concert – a very strong one but still a concert – rather than the enveloping nature of theatre.

The narrative is divided into two very distinct parts, both taking place in the small town of the title. The first section, entitled Just One Q and set in 1961, has a libretto by Ellen Fitzhugh, while the second, Ruby, set in 1988, is by Harrison David Rivers.

In the first section, Cunningham renders a warm-hearted portrayal of Benny, an amiable, easy-going fellow, who has worked as an orderly in a nursing home for years. We also learn he is the father of two young twin daughters, raising them alone, his wife being mentally incapacitated.

Benny describes the quarrels between two white women at the facility, often embodying them in both dialogue and song, with a singing voice that astonishingly verges on a counter-tenor. The women are Julynne, who runs the place, and Bertha, a patient. While they argue over their game of Scrabble, their animosity runs much deeper. They were both married to the same man.

Bertha, his first wife, bore him 11 children before he ran off to marry the younger Julynne. But before he left her, Bertha had her revenge. She sizzled his privates with a heavy laundry iron. The title of the first half refers to the women’s debate as to who was the man’s real “Q” or queen.

But the Julynne-Bertha relationship is only a prelude to Benny’s tale. Berthe is leaving the nursing home to live with her granddaughter out of town, and Benny has volunteered to drive her. He has an ulterior motive. It seems he’s interested in viewing the Freedom Riders, the civil rights activists who at the time were putting their lives in danger to travel the Southern US and secure voting rights for blacks.

After delivering Bertha, Benny himself gets caught up in the action of the Freedom Riders, rides on their bus, participates in protests, spends time in jail and gains a new sense of self, courage and purpose. And as he drives home to his daughters, he sings in quiet triumph of bringing them “a reborn man – their dad”.

In the second half, Fulton plays Ruby, Benny’s younger twin daughter, now a grown woman. She has come to the Broadbend cemetery to find solace or calm after her teenage son has been severely beaten by the police after falsely being accused of drug-dealing and resisting arrest.

As she talks at their gravesides, we learn that Benny never arrived home from his Freedom Rider adventure and it was the good-hearted Julynne who took charge of the two twins, eventually adopting them. Benny was killed on the highway, stopped by a traffic cop who fatally shot him as he was reaching for his car papers, the cop saying he believed Benny was reaching for a gun.

Ruby’s worries for her son are intertwined with memories of growing up beside her sister, Sam, the more ambitious and aggressive of the twins, who is no longer around although her fate is never specified. For Ruby, life has been one of stunted dreams, exacerbated by her teenage pregnancy. And with all the memories and concerns crowding in on her, her fury and despair rise to a boiling point.

It’s then that the show works most strongly, with Benny appearing as a spirit, and the two of them communing to find hope for Ruby, Benny telling her that she – like the Freedom Riders – must get back on the bus and work to get her son to a better world.

With the two actors working together, expressing so tellingly the love between the two characters, Broadbend, Arkansas finally and briefly becomes a play. Nevertheless, there is much to value and take to heart beforehand as well.

Ron Cohen