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The Best of All Possible Intentions: Yellow Face and Good Bones
David Henry Hwang and James Ijames on places where idealism runs up against success.
I often wished that director Saheem Ali and scenic designer Maruti Evans had surrounded them with a similarly nuanced environment: Their rendering of Aisha and Travis’s remodeled mansion is colorless and characterless — all oppressive neutrals and towering shelves full of white ceramics kept behind glass, too random and too high up for any practical use. It’s true that Earl rants about the fashionable “monochromatic kitchens” of the wealthy, but he and Travis also agree that people, with money or without it, are always looking for “character and charm.” Nothing about the home onstage seduces us, but that seduction, that feeling of niceness that’s so apt to overwhelm our ethical angels, is partly the point. Sometimes, it’s the people who love them who try to rebuild the bridges — Carmen, a smart, good-natured freshman at Penn who won’t be easily backed into any one-sided take, or Travis, whom Athie imbues with a sense of both pathos and backbone that emerges gradually and to real emotional effect.
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