Blood at the Root Dominique Morrisseau’s play inspired by the Jena Six case, in which six black teenagers were initially charged with attempted murder in the beating of a white classmate after nooses were hung from a tree on campus in their small, mostly white Louisiana town, is given a furious and urgent staging by the Yard and Jackalope Theatre Company. From the moment the audience enters through a metal detector to take their seats before the classroom/football field/school hallway set, the tension is palpable, and it doesn’t let up until the show’s end. The cast, composed entirely of current and recent high-schoolers, talk, sing, rap, and dance their message with a passion impossible to ignore. Blood at the Root vividly illustrates the near impossibility of getting through one’s teenage years—fraught in the best-case scenario—unscathed when also having to tackle larger societal problems. It’s a necessary and evocative production all-around. —Dmitry Samarov
Graham Cracker We’re not talking digestive biscuits here. As it’s applied in Tony Mendoza’s new play, “graham cracker” denotes somebody who’s nominally Chicano yet acts white. I suppose the idea is that grahams have a brown tint and “cracker” can refer to white folks. But I don’t know that for sure because, like a lot of things in this Broad Shoulders Productions show, the phrase isn’t explained very well. In bare outline Graham Cracker is a Mexican-American family saga. Dad is a wannabe baseball star turned mean drunk, Mom is loyal but bitter, and their son—the GC—is caught in between. Little beyond these basics is clear, however. Mendoza finds neither the heart of his story nor a coherent way of telling it. Though his leads (Alberto Mendoza and Angela Vela) are endearing, there’s no way they can stop the chaos. —Tony Adler
Wounds to the Face A young woman feels “jailed” behind her face. A surgeon tells a disfigured soldier he’ll be “forever hideous.” A king punishes a portraitist for making him immortal. As Australian writer Alison Croggon once put it, the 18 vignettes comprising this 1994 work by British provocateur Howard Barker form “a kind of theatrical essay on identity . . . driven not by narrative but by questions: What is a face? What does it mean to ‘lose face’? What are we without a face?” While strong enough to limn those questions, Andrew Root’s staging for Runcible Theatre only fitfully inhabits them. The sticking point: Barker’s arch diction. Most cast members seem to equate it with grim formality, leaving just a few brave enough to play. Among the latter, Robert Bouwman, Grant Niezgodski, and Morgan McCabe give fierce, funny performances. —Tony Adler
