Dot, written and directed by Colman Domingo. Through October 20, 2019 at People’s Light, 39 Conestoga Road, Malvern, PA.
A comedy about a person with Alzheimers may seem like an outrageous idea. But I beg to differ.
Comic plays about war and death and other tragedies can be valid. A warm, sensitive examination of the topic would be welcome. Dot, however, fails to meet the challenge.
This is an aggressive sit-com with cartoonish characters. It displays a middle-class family in West Philadelphia with a matriarch who’s in the early stages of dementia. Her offspring are caricatures who incessantly shout at each other. Anger predominates. There’s no sensitivity or subtlety, no poignancy that suggests the sadness of the situation.
Now, it’s natural for adult children to feel anger towards siblings who aren’t sharing the caretaking of their parents. But anger loses its punch when it’s incessant.
The play starts when the son’s high school girlfriend comes back to Philly after a long absence. She stops at Dot’s house and observes turmoil between the mother and her elder daughter and says, “Maybe it’s a bad time. I should leave. I can come back.” She says it five times over the span of several minutes. So why doesn’t she leave? Because that logical move would interrupt the script’s clumsy exposition. And so the play bumps along from one manufactured crisis to another.
Other flaws include an offensively stereotyped gay couple, and a trashy younger sibling. Also, there’s an overabundance of people saying “fuck” and “fuckin’” which seems out of place for this family which includes educated professionals in a well-appointed home which is described as “upscale” (set design by William Boles.) The dialogue diminishes the stature of the characters.
It’s a worthy goal to produce the creations of local playwrights (Domingo graduated from Temple University), and to mount plays set in the Delaware Valley, and the work of black playwrights — although Peoples Light is not laggard in those departments, having produced an earlier play by Domingo and two plays by Dominique Morisseau.
Earnest acting is supplied by Natalie Carter, Zuhairah, André Ward, Parker Drown, K. O’Rourke, Kai Heath and Tyler Elliott.