"Herbert III" and "Contribution": A Dichotomy
In One Act

Written by Ted Shine
Directed by Phyllis E. Griffin
(Two  One-Act Plays)

On Thursday July 22, 2010 I had the pleasure of seeing two one act plays performed at eta Theater. In light of the week in political idiocy these two plays were timely. Both plots were rooted in the Civil Rights Movement and frankly it helped me to focus and affiliate with the dramatic events of the day. To be honest one play was better than the other.

The first play, Herbert III was tacitly funny - pitting a doting mother, Margarette (Tiffany Griffin), against an enabling father, Herbert (Antoine Pierre Whitfield), who is trying to let his son grow up outside the paranoid clutches of his overly protective mother. There were some very funny parts, especially when Herbert tries unsuccessfully to make love to his wife trying to take her mind off of her son; However, it appeared predictable in some of the transitions as the storyline changed, trying to keep your attention.

The two actors were believable as a couple; their body language suggested a level of comfort that only true lovers can pull off. If in fact they are not romantically linked, and I don’t have any reason to believe that they are, their immersion into their characters (roles) was well done. Despite the great acting, I felt that there was an exuberance of predictability with the mother lamenting about the safety of her boy; the father reluctant to look for him (wanting the boy to grow up and be a man); and ultimately finding out on her husband's return that her son, indeed, is able to handle being an adult in a racially unsympathetic 1960’s era Dallas.

The second play, Contribution, was more poignant and was very funny. Again we find ourselves in a 1960’s era southern town where a group of young folk are plotting to integrate a lunch counter downtown. There is a classic conflict between the "young bucks" questioning the commitment of the “old heads.” This is played out aptly by Mrs. Grace Love, a/k/a Grandma (Felisha McNeal) and her visiting-from-the-north grandson Eugene Love (Jerod Haynes).

This play had a tremendous amount of energy and I was captivated by the well-developed storyline. In addition to these two main characters, Katy Jones (Tiffany Griffin) is a great sidekick for Mrs. Love and very instrumental in delivering some very memorable lines.

This play is about fear and conquering it - and, sometimes not in the most traditional ways. It is about young versus old and misperceptions about commitment and methods of getting things done. Finally, it is about teachable moments and the recognition that as far apart as we may appear, because we’ve grown up at different points of time or under different circumstances, we can all still get involved in the way we know best and triumph over evil. For Mrs. Love her involvement wasn’t sitting at lunch counters, but portraying grace and dignity in the face of abject racism. She worked in the Jim Crow south as a domestic for a white doctor who refused to treat her husband, and, as a result, he died. This story isn’t unlike Shirley Sherrod’s story of helping a white farmer after her own father was killed by a white supremacist; but, Mrs. Love believed in retribution and, unlike Ms. Sherrod, and she got retribution and satisfaction as her employers died off one by one. Not until the end do we know how her employers died and this is where the idea of Contribution is exposed in full bloom.

Larry D. Wayne
Larry@so-LAZE.com

"Herbert III" and "Contribution" continue through August 22, 2010 at eta Creative Arts.