Review: A Love Story, a Critique, a Cry of Despair: SHEEPDOG at Contemporary American Theater Festival

Sheepdog, by Kevin Artigue, is a love story, a tragedy, a critique of policing in American cities, and a cry of despair about race relations in this divided land. It traces the arc of an interracial love affair between two young Cleveland cops, Amina (Sarah Ellen Stephens) and Ryan (Doug Harris). It begins promisingly, as he nurses her through a service-related injury. Their love grows as she recovers. They begin speaking of raising a family together. They navigate successfully their racial and cultural differences. There's just one problem...

That one problem, though, though it starts small, ends up big. It tugs a whole bundle of other things into their story. In the bundle, we discover, lurk the almost inescapably racist task of policing in big cities, much of it enforcing drug laws that essentially render illegal a major part of the culture and commerce of cities (laws historically adopted essentially as a means of criminalizing Blackness), together with rules of police stops and use of force that time and again fail to provide for an arrestee's circumstances, including mental illness. The very White and very macho culture of policing, the "sheepdog" mentality of the title, amplifies the danger. And then, even with safeguards like body cameras to keep the police honest, the recordings they generate - even as supplemented by civilian phone recordings - seldom result in accountability. All of these issues crowd into the problem.

And that's what happens here. Ryan pulls over a car without a front tag, and the next thing he knows the Black driver is dead by his hand. As his account of the encounter gradually changes, and as Amina begins to spot the evolution of his tale, and then in consequence begins to investigate on her own, the viability of their relationship inevitably comes in question, because if Ryan did what it begins to look as if he did, then at least on one occasion he acted as a racist bad cop. And could Amina link her life with that of someone who behaved that way?

Certain strengths of the play simply cannot be conveyed in a precis like this. Artigue is awfully good at conveying with a few deft touches the complexities of such a relationship, at once interracial and intramural, and then of the unraveling that begins in it. He has police culture down, with all the constraints, the social customs, and the subgroups. And he understands, without polemicizing, the way a frequently toxic masculinity in police culture prompts lethal intrusions into fragile Black neighborhoods. (Baltimore theatergoers will recognize a lot of this, including a group of officers who resemble the city's former Gun Trace Task Force.) All is sketched out with deft and telling detail.

This wide-ranging portrait of a world askew is written out as poetry, as in this speech of Amina's about her foot chase of a suspect, responsible for the injury from which she is recovering at the beginning of the action:

"You reach the fence, think about waiting for backup

But instead... you summon your inner Jackie Joyner and with all your strength swing one leg up

Then the other

Pause to steady before letting gravity do the rest

As you drop...

Your feet expect to hit the ground but

The ground, it's not there

It's farther than you thought

Eventually you land and when you do you hear a POP

You find yourself on your back

Howling at the east Cleveland moon"

In the end, it is largely the combination of sensitively-selected detail and poetic diction on the one hand, and the big-picture view of various interlocked social problems that makes the show so extraordinary. In that big picture, the problems are too pervasive, too ingrained to surmount, and well-intentioned people trying to escape those problems will probably fail. In the end, the play suggests, we are much more the product of the forces that shaped us than of our own volition.

Of course the actors make the play too. Sarah Ellis Stephens' Amina is capable of enormous toughness but also of enormous tenderness - and it is the latter, so beautifully enacted, that especially makes the story so heart-wrenching. But she cannot lie to herself either. Hence the last thing she wants to do is the precise thing that she is being driven towards. And Doug Harris' Ryan is the perfect foil for this kind of character: an appealing and mostly decent, mostly honorable, mostly caring, mostly unbigoted young man most women would love to take home to their parents, and he comes achingly close to being right for her.

The other big thing the play has going for it is playwright Artigue's skill in plot architecture. There's an art to playing the cards that set up the conclusion. In dramatic terms, almost the entire play is a single slow reveal, but in happens in stages and with a definite rhythm. We see the beginning of the final climactic scene at the beginning of the show, so he's been telling us from the first where we're going, but we will barely recognize that scene when it's replayed at the end, as it now bears such a different emotional valence, and we can see exactly how we got through the transformation.

In short, a beautifully-written, beautifully-performed play. Not to be missed.

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Sheepdog, by Kevin Artigue, directed by Melissa Crespo, presented through July 31 by the Contemporary American Theater Festival at Studio 112, 92 West Campus Drive, Shepherdstown, WV 25443. Tickets $38-$68. Adult language, sexual behavior, adult situations. All audience members will be required to show proof of vaccination status and photo ID, and to wear a mask while in the theater.

Production photo credit: Seth Freeman.

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