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It was only days until Kamala Harris was to announce her pick of Coach Walz as her VP partner unleashing much media buzz about what a real manly man is. But for those of us taking in playwright Melda Beaty’s Coconut Cake script, the conversation had already started in a most poignant way.
We are with a gaggle of men in the almost antiseptic space of a McDonalds. This is where they regularly gather for chess and what the Irish call good craic. They are not only old friends, but in actuarial terms old. Then again, when a comely young woman makes her routine departure from her apartment building across the street you wonder if one of them might even start drooling. They don’t seem that old at all. Men!— they are men! They are heterosexual and all but one are Black Men.
One of them is more or less living in his car because his wife could no longer brook his catting around. Another swaggers as though he were the king of the street, ever scheming to make his big bucks and bully his way. Yet another is a church deacon and loyal to the core to his wife, though we come to learn that passion was never part of their mating equation. The White guy is the deacon’s brother-in-law, long married and faithful to his late wife and the deacon’s sister.
International Black Theater Festival Stages a Play About Multiple Hot Topics
We never meet the new neighbor who makes the titular coconut cake. She does intrigue these men perhaps even more than the beauty across the street who leaves her building like clockwork drawing them to the window. Lust for the baker is but one focal point of the story where all the issues of manhood in the realities of NOW play out— from misogyny, to navigating racism, to AIDS, and more hot topics of today’s street that drive the story from start to finish.
In this writer’s view, however, it is catapulting of mental illness issues centerstage in the story that clings most. This is especially thanks to the performance by Brian Cager as the truth telling schizophrenic street person whom all the men shamefully dismiss as an annoyance and in fact nickname as Goddamit.
You too may feel that the men’s callous disregard for Goddamit’s humanity is likely something most in the audience would feel too. SPOILER ALERT: Until the end, when we get to see Goddamit through a different and unexpected lens of being a committed father role model, despite all.
Playwright Melia Beaty shakes our tree.
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Visit the NC Black Rep and International Black Theater Festival website for more information on upcoming productions.
Photos courtesy of International Black Theater Festival.
Coconut Cake
Written by Melda Beaty
Place/Time McDonald’s in Chicago, 2010
CAST:
Brian Cager — Gotdammit
Ron Himes — Eddie
Phillip Powell — Hank
Nathan Purdee — Joe
Count Stovall — Marty
Creative Team:
Technical Director — Arthur M. Reese
Scenic/Lighting Design — Jennifer O’Kelly
Costume Design — Frenchie La’Vern
Sound Design — Jasmine Williams
Production Stage Manager — Kevin Hampton
Director — Nathan Ross Freeman
About the Author: Amy Munice
Amy Munice is Editor-in-Chief and Co-Publisher of Picture This Post. She covers books, dance, film, theater, music, museums and travel. Prior to founding Picture This Post, Amy was a freelance writer and global PR specialist for decades—writing and ghostwriting thousands of articles and promotional communications on a wide range of technical and not-so-technical topics.
