(This is a meditation on gentrification, locked deep in the review of a play that you probably won't see. But you really should, if you can. It's smart, it's funny.)
Last night, I was in the Lower East Side, seeing “There Goes the Neighborhood” at PS 122. (Full disclaimer: while PS 122 stages great stuff, I don’t usually fly in from Seattle for it. But when a childhood friend writes the play, I do.) I was still adjusting to New York: I’d gotten off my plane, zipped about by train, and was just about in place. I’d almost gotten used to streets flowing with taxis and busses, subways running everywhere, and cafes, restaurants, and kitchen-supply stores on each corner.
But I hadn’t heard a Brooklyn-Italian accent for a while, so when Deanna Pacelli stepped on stage as Vinnie, a tough salami-slicer, it took me a few words before I was quite adapted. When I caught up with him, Vinnie was talking about his shop (which sells the best mozzarella in Brooklyn, and possibly the world) which he’d inherited from his father. Which he had inherited, in turn, from his father.
Vinne isn't as happy with the way his street is today.
Deanna's accent quickly changed: a glass of wine, and she was a bar owner who had moved in from Long Island. A flick of her hair, a shawl in her lap, and a she was a Puerto Rican immigrant. A broke worker who had moved in looking for cheaper housing. An Italian grandmother, a gay town improvement activist. A retired librarian.
Each of them had a piece of a story to tell about Smith Street, a recently-gentrified neighborhood in Brooklyn. Mari Brown, the forementioned childhood friend, had settled on Smith Street in 2000, and had taken a job as a waitress. She started getting to know the regulars at the local bar, and—not long after starting—began to collect their stories.
Everyone had something to say about how the street became the way it was: the changes that had happened since it was a bustling Italian neighborhood in the 50s and 60s, and how it had been named as “trendiest restaurant row” in the 21st century. Some were proud. Some were upset. Some were worried, or nostalgic.
There are a lot of sides to gentrification, and the idea of a neighborhood. Everyone has their own favorite moment, something that makes the neighborhood work. Is it decades of tradition, as Vinnie suggests? Or is it being a good gathering place? (If so, do you gather on the stoop, in a bar, in a coffeehouse, or in a cocktail lounge with hot breakbeats?) Is it important to know your neighbors? Do you want to be protected by your tough cousins, or by the faceless police?
None of these have easy answers. They all get brought out during debates about how neighborhoods should be shaped, or reshaped.
Mari collected these stories, and wove them together into a play. Her roommate, Deanna Pacelli, is an actress, and was a fellow waitress; she brought the characters back to life on stage. The different perspectives are all raised, held up to the light, considered. None are ignored or laughed-off; even though the play is a comedy (and it is a particularly funny one, largely just because people are funny), it’s a sensitive one.
While the one-actor-plays-a-small-army has definitely Been Done, and so often tastes more than a little stale, this particular take is impressively constructed and feels fresh. Rather than a series of standalone monologues, this play gives shorter bits to the characters and ties them more closely together. The actress smoothly slides between the characters; she brings them back to chat, to argue with each other, to change their minds. Different moments in history get examined from three or four different perspectives. And a story is gradually constructed.
Upon writing this, and only now, I realize that Mari tells it like a documentary. This isn’t a bad way to construct a story: we meet a growing series of opinionated experts who each have something important to say. The storytelling forms a coherent unit, and we get a history and a direction in one.
They showed it in Brooklyn (and brought the subjects to watch) last year to general acclaim, including a New York Times review. Now they’ve moved up to Off-Off-Broadway in a limited run
that closes on May 29 (sorry about the short notice), with another Times review a few days ago.