Magic Theatre stages a touching prison drama

Jailbirds find friendship at Magic Theatre

Two rooms: (1) a jail cell, and (2) a shabby bedroom, and two lives play out in them, in playwright Naomi Wallace’s raw and touching study of fated women’s lives, And I And Silence, now at Magic Theatre in San Francisco.

The women are Dee, who is white, and Jamie, who is black.  We meet them at age seventeen, in prison.  They’re locked up, but their spirits aren’t fettered.  They’re wary, and they act tough, but they burn with a core of hope, and they have dreams to give them wings.  Those dreams are a measure of how narrow their outlook is: they want only to be housemaids.  But in their imaginations the job will make them happy.  They’ll be free from jail, they’ll have a bit of money, they can make a home and maybe find a couple of decent, loving guys, and they’ll all live together, the four of them, in some shimmering future they’re convinced is possible.

Their naive hope is deeply touching as we watch them in their narrow cell, acting out being maids, practicing posing gracefully as they pretend to dust.  They imagine themselves princesses of housecleaning, and we long for them to succeed, but a decade passes, and in alternating scenes to the prison scenes, we see them grown up, in their mid-twenties, living in a squalid flat, their dreams crumbling as reality edges them toward disaster.

That reality is 1950s America, in which a young black woman alone on the street may be in peril of, at the least, verbal abuse, and in which friendship between a black woman and a white one has to be carefully concealed.  The repressive circumstance tries their friendship, and so does ill-luck at love: Jamie’s boyfriend turns out to be married.  So does housework.  Men exploit them, demanding sex, and when Dee succumbs (they’re desperate for money for food), she crosses a line both of them made a pact never to cross.

The title And I And Silence comes from the Emily Dickinson poem, “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain,” so it’s not surprising that the climax of Wallace’s play is wrenching.  But the overall effect of the work is of a touching women’s tragedy.  Many scenes play with great charm, due to the talent and warm appeal of the four women who embody the roles: Jessi Campbell and Tristan Cunningham as grown-up Dee and Jamie, and Siobhan Marie Doherty and Angel Moore as young Dee and Jamie.  They have the vibrant charge of youth and wonderful, fresh smiles.

Loretta Greco directs with firmness and feeling, aided by a fine support team: Daniel Ostling, who designed the austerely eloquent set, and Brandin Baron (costumes), Stephen Strawbridge (lighting) and Sara Huddleston (sound).  

And I And Silence is small scale, but within its circumscribed frame it’s affecting.  It plays at Fort Mason until November 23rd, followed by Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind in January.  For tickets/information call 415-441-8822 or visit www.magictheatre.org. 

–ROBERT HALL