Branford | Legacy Theatre | Arts & Culture | Theater | COVID-19
Anthony Brown as Jamal Green and Jhulenty Delossantos as Dougie Cordova in Steve Driffin's Jamal. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Jamal and Dougie stand at a literal crossroads, Hartford traffic whirring around them. They look around; Jamal shifts his weight from foot to foot. From the low light, a figure emerges. He studies the two of them quizzically, then comes closer. An electric current runs through the air. Or maybe it’s a winter chill. Whatever it is, it feels icy, like the ground is no longer steady beneath anyone’s feet.
That drama unfolds in Steve Driffin and Charlie Grady’s Jamal, a new one-act play coming to the Legacy Theatre in Branford on July 25. Written in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the work tells the story of two friends caught in a cycle of gun violence, anti-Black racism, and lack of wealth redistribution that is as American as the insurrection itself.
Tickets are available here.
Driffin, a New and West Haven playwright who serves as the Director of Youth Programs and Co-Director of Operations at ConnCAT during the day, said he is working to secure a spot in New Haven for a longer run. It is produced by HangTime Productions, the creative brainchild of Grady. He is the director of an eponymous violence intervention program in Bridgeport. The two worked together on the play Her Time, which ran at the Bijou Theatre, shortly before the pandemic.
Playwright Steve Driffin.
Jamal is set in Hartford, between a one bedroom apartment and a dark stretch of Albany Avenue. In roughly an hour, it tells the story of childhood friends Jamal Green (Anthony Brown) and Dougie Cordova (Jhulenty Delossantos), who get mixed up in violence while trying to make a deal with a tweaky Trump supporting white guy named Conner (Emmett Cassidy). The two both love Dougie’s girlfriend Harmony Ferrara (Chloe Lang), a white, UConn dropout from the suburbs who is about a minute pregnant when the show begins.
Driffin is interested in layers of language and meaning, and he peels them away gradually to get to the core of the show. When the play opens on January 6, 2021, he probes the in-between spaces that exist in its cracks: what words are on and off limits and for whom, how opioids make white people “sick,” but crack turns Black people into criminals with disproportionate sentences; how appreciation is fine but appropriation is not.
The framing is a Russian nesting doll of trauma, and it works. The rising action takes place during a national event spurred by white supremacy, playing out on television sets across a country segregated by white supremacy, and in a city that is under-resourced because of white supremacy. There are not years or even decades at play here: this is a work about centuries.
Chloe Lang as Harmony Ferrara and Anthony Brown as Jamal Green.
Within those dolls, Driffin looks to guns as weapons that end the lives of not just victims and their families, but also their assailants. It feels close to home in a year that has seen a spike in gun-related homicides, including 17 in New Haven and over 20 in Hartford.
Between the time that Driffin wrote Jamal in March and brought it to the theater this month, both cities continued to report horrific instances of gun violence. In Branford, where the houses sit far apart and there are virtually no sidewalks, it feels like both a wake-up call and a study in wealth, privilege, and whiteness.
As they navigate the moment, characters feel familiar, sometimes sticky and not uncomplicated. In her and Dougie’s apartment, Harmony romanticizes hip-hop and argues on the phone with her mother over cash transfers and Trump-supporting relatives in a cadence that could come from the gentrifier down the hall. When she swerves from grieving rituals to racial slurs, and her anti-racist journey seems more like a messy, internal tug-of-war.
Dougie laughs off Jamal’s excitement about an equestrian program at Brown University—and so engages in an unspoken dialogue about stereotype, internalized oppression and anti-Blackness—but he also wants to see his friend make it to college. Jamal threads a linguistic needle and pulls out J.A. Rogers and Franz Fanon, unpacking 402 years of oppression at a steady clip.
Jhulenty Delossantos as Dougie Cordova. Emmett Cassidy, who plays Connor, is in the background.
When he exclaims “The words! The words matter!” it feels right on time. So does his use of the phrase “forked tongue,” which brings a history of Native genocide into a year when multiple protesters at the Capitol wore redface.
At the newly rebuilt theater, the play shares the stage with the soaring set for Oedipus Rex, which opens July 28. Actors use it to their advantage, telling a story that hangs somewhere between a small Hartford apartment and a sweeping Greek tragedy. It becomes an extra character in the show, dredging up questions of fate, history, and generational curses that are entirely manmade.
At a recent rehearsal, actors slid in and out of character, resurrecting the Hartford winter in the midst of a blazing July. On stage, Brown debated Lang on a couch as a music stand stood in for a t.v. set. Behind a camera, Hamden High student Ashlyn Topper watched multiple takes of the same scene, characters playing with props and pratfalls until they got the timing right. She nibbled on Ritz crackers and studied scenes.
“There are some little hiccups we’ve gotta get straight,” Driffin said at the end of a full run. “But we’re getting there.”
Ashlynn Topper, a student at Hamden High School, is working behind the scenes on the show.
As he stretched in the parking lot before a full run through, Delossantos said he learns from Dougie every time he dips back into the character. The actor, who was born and raised in the Dominican Republic and then studied theater at Housatonic Community College, sees in Dougie a reminder that life is short—and fragile.
He’s grateful to be back on the stage after 16 months of virtual productions, quick turnaround playwriting festivals, and multiple seasons of postponed and cancelled gigs. He heard about the role from fellow Housatonic alum Betzabeth Castro, who was in the middle of a run of Skeleton Crew in New Haven when the pandemic led to cancellations of the show.
“I love it,” he said. “I love all of the emotional moments in the play.”
Tina Lang, a longtime friend of Grady's who is working on the show.
Brown, who was born and raised in Hartford, said that he’s also pulled lessons from the play. In 2019, he quit his job to pursue acting full time. Through producer and filmmaker Joe Young, he landed a role in a television pilot. A pilot led to a lead role in All In: The Family, a movie released on Amazon Prime last year. Then the pandemic hit.
“It’s kind of like you get the training wheels off your bike, and then it rains,” he said. Jamal was the antidote. On stage, he plays him with a sort of reverence and respect, so certain of his goodness that it's hard to tell where the actor begins and ends. He’s also close to the play: he was born and raised in Hartford, and still lives in the city because he has family there.
“It has been amazing,” he said. “Honestly, I’m always learning something about theater. I’m learning about myself.”
Jamal runs July 25 at the Legacy Theatre in Branford. Tickets and more information are available here.