Wheatley

When history teachers passed the class hour with educational cartoons designed to make history fun, it looked like Saturday-morning shows, but you always knew the whole thing was pretty square. Despite clever rhyming and the kernel of a good idea, Carter's Wheatley, a hip-hop telling of the slave-poet, is the theatrical equivalent. Yet it's certainly a worthy premise: rendering Phillis Wheatley, an 18th-century slave who became the first published African-American poet, through a modern spoken-word beat. And the cartoonishness is intended; with a cutout backdrop and overdrawn characters (from Phillis's silly mistress to her buffoonish fellow slaves), there's nothing naturalistic here, and the actors step up to that playfulness admirably. But intending the broad strokes isn't the same as making a case for them.

Eager to show his hip-hop cred (a hip on his shoulder, as it were), Carter works overtime to speak history in a youth-friendly lingo, but he gives little more than timeline highlights of Wheatley's life, and his language isn't innovative enough to keep us from noticing. By the end, we're still wondering who she was and what her life might've been like. With catchy wordplay, the kitchen sink may not be in the language, but it is in the play's dawdling rhythm. Scruggs just needs to amp up the whole thing—likewise with Misha Fiksel's loopy score, which sounds like ambient music from the next room. Like those history-class toons, Wheatley tries hard to be cool, but achieves mostly faux fun.—Novid Parsi