A Fool Such as I

Edwards’s play was born of the longtime Negro Ensemble playwright’s interest in daytime television talk shows. Appropriately, it’s heavy on all the histrionics, archetypical posturing, and structured twists and escalations available to fill an hour or two. But it’s also a surprisingly perceptive examination of the way we simultaneously live and narrate our lives in an era of relentlessly public dirty laundry.

When a young, unemployed hustler (Goodloe) meets an older married woman (Burks) , of course you can probably guess the rest, but you’ll also be surprised at their seduction’s moments of disarmingly comic self-awareness and self-destruction. The cast is rounded out by a hapless, dopey husband (Needham) and—the only character outside of the talk-show mold—the sparkling Williams as the nosy neighbor who unravels the affair.

Unfortunately, the production’s weakness is too often the acting, which is too big and too static to navigate the almost perversely difficult task of Edwards’s script. Almost the entire play is written to be spoken directly to the audience in past tense—the characters narrating scenes even as they act them out. The varieties this could produce in tone and intimacy, however, and the revelations it could offer on life with an assumed spectatorship, are sadly obscured. Given additional sensitivity, these characters could grow to better balance the deliberate pulpiness of Edwards’s plot and the honest tragedy it flirts with.

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