A revenge drama driven by powerful performances

By Joseph Hurley

THE DEAL, by Gyavira Lasana. Directed by Conall Morrison. At Nuyorican Poets Cafe, 236 East 3rd St. NYC. Through Jan. 27.

Conall Morrison, associate director of Ireland’s National Theater, the Abbey, is making his official New York debut with a 45-minute one-act by an African-American playwright Gyavira Lasana.

“The Deal” marks the 35-year-old Morrison’s first experience of dealing with American material in an American setting. His only previous local exposure was when the Gate Theatre brought his revival of Brian Friel’s “The Freedom of the City” to Lincoln Center as part of “Summerfest 2000.”

Lasana’s brief play, which the program says is located in “the sub-basement of a county jail,” feels so relentlessly urban that it seems to be taking place in the holding pen of a police station house.

“The Deal” requires a cast of five performers, all of them black and all but one male. Three of the men are in handcuffs, two of them manacled wrist-to-wrist and the third, a nearly silent giant, bound to the leg of the table that serves as the centerpiece of designer Sonia Alio’s stripped-down setting.

Despite a considerable amount of extremely vivid writing, and two genuinely standout performances, playwright Lasana could be said to have put on a pair of invisible cuffs, binding himself to an unbelievable boilerplate revenge plot that, when all is said and done, fails to support his ideas about the perverted realities of the criminal justice system.

A massive, incoherent-seeming figure, Mush, stumbles down the Nuyorican’s center aisle and mounts the stage, where a uniformed guard cuffs him to the long, battered table.

A powerfully built prisoner Odell, is ushered in, manacled and brimming with outrage, to be interviewed by a small, tense woman identified only as Dan’, who is probably an assistant district attorney.

Odell, a rehabilitated petty criminal and substance abuser, until recently employed by the Welfare Department, has been arrested and charged with the murder of a neighborhood crack dealer in a shooting he claims only to have witnessed, and which he attributes to one of two police officers prowling the area in a squad car.

A customer of the deceased, Odell, who had been seen and videotaped in the vicinity, appears to be a likely suspect in the killing, and therefore the most logical of targets for Dan”s complicated, albeit unconvincing, retribution scheme.

Dan’ has a hidden agenda, a secret involving the actual identity of the broken, lumbering, childlike Mush, who seems to be a more or less regular fixture around the “county jail” where the playwright has set his story.

What is difficult to believe, if not completely impossible, is that Dan’, played with a surfeit of shrillness by Laurine Towler, could have had even the shallowest hope of getting away with the “deal” she lays before Odell.

Where the director, reportedly among the finest of Ireland’s younger theater professionals, has been most strikingly successful with “The Deal” is in his handling of two of the actors the writer had conscripted for the project before Morrison arrived from Ireland.

As the internally erupting Odell, Lamman Rucker, a formidable stage presence under any circumstances, brings genuine heat to “The Deal.” Equally effective is an actor who goes by the single name, Barshem, playing a character identified only as “young gangster” who enters the play in its closing moments, handcuffed and equipped with an eloquent, rap-inspired aria.

— Joseph Hurley