CHANICOUA IN ABSTRACT Crossest Tram

“Just follow the lines,” said the disembodied listener's voice. “Could you say it a little more hurtfully?”

The “lines” in the Shaniqua Jenkins audition don't need much extrapolation, it's just that “Girl!” consists of word variations.

Much more interesting are the lines that playwright/star Bahia Watson draws around them, as her CHANIQUA IN ABSTRACT “penetrates into multiple worlds of stories.”

Directed by Sabrine Rock, behind the hit Theater Passe Murille Our land, Watson's show is a series of 85-minute sketches about the joys and frustrations of being a black woman right now. At the audition, Watson's hopeful but exhausted actor says he would give anything to look through someone else's eyes to see what he looks like. This begins a spiral through the Shanikvaverse, where all sorts of different but related perspectives come together.

As Shaniqua is in a variety of situations, Watson discusses her fear of being “too much” in all of them. As one Shaniqua, she returns to her usual routine at Sistahood Comedy Club, where the comedy becomes less and less until she starts calling on familiar cultural pillars to try to make her audience laugh again. In other words, he sells the magic of appearing “ethnically ambiguous” with a tool kit including a shiny, lettered jacket (costumes by Desiree Gray) over a bright orange tracksuit that proclaims how enigmatically enigmatic you look.

In nuanced and varied ways, Watson embraces the dehumanizing experience of white filth and slavery; In one particularly detailed and poetic fragment, Shaniqua is a woman used as the family's wet nurse, who wears a yellow dress outside to match the sunlight and regains some of her humanity. In another, clerk Shaniqua has a tense confrontation with a white colleague in front of a black-and-white projection of Watson playing the colleague as the background; This segment has a level of suspense similar to nature documentaries, as the group chooses sides and tries to put the offending person in his place.

While White Tenderness gets most of the attention, including a sketch about the fight's ending super move, which is the “I'm under attack” scream, no one gets criticism or commentary. While waiting for her show to begin, Shaniqua, a talk show host, tells the audience about the appropriation and privilege of black culture by other non-white groups. Then the cameras roll, she adds cuteness to settle an argument about colorism between two black women, one light-skinned and the other dark-skinned.

Watson later speculates that black men's tendency to reject black women stems from a desire to be seen as the racial authority in the relationship, which means they don't want to question their particularly oppressed partner.

Laura Warren's projections on screen strips covering the back wall match the monologue, moving from talk show to comedy club to liminal space in space. Telling which Shaniqua we're meeting when, accompanied by logical sound cues by Thomas Ryder Payne (including Sister, sister), they are an efficient way to keep up with where we are in the multiverse.

Near the end of the show, Watson portrays a woman in prison in group therapy. This quote shows why his performance is so compelling; he can express several feelings at the same time, mixing equally complex emotions into a complex dialogue. Shaniqua in the band is a revelation in her tender, heart-wrenching observations. He tells us he doesn't like curtains; he prefers to introduce light.

This is my general impression of SHANICUA IN ABSTRACT; Demanding and unflinching in her commentary on how society has failed black women, her main goal is to shine a bright light of one voice into a world of many.

Baia Watson photo by Roya DelSol