Review: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' WAR is Wonderfully Surprising and Discomforting

Thirty-one year old playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has never been one to back off from the possibility of making his audience feel uncomfortable. In NEIGHBORS, his 2010 Off-Broadway debut, he presented a lovable African-American family of entertainers, the Crows, who wore exaggerated blackface and performed exceedingly vulgar and demeaning burlesque routines from 100 years ago.

In WAR, now playing at Lincoln Center's Claire Tow Theater, members of his primarily African-American cast occasionally break away from the human characters they're playing to transform into hunched-over, growling, snarling apes.

As is often the case with the playwright's oeuvre, which also includes co-Obie-winners APPROPRIATE and AN OCTOROON and Pulitzer finalist GLORIA, WAR is a play that is loaded with ideas, surprises and some of the sharpest writing around.

Director Lileana Blain-Cruz also mounted the play's 2014 premiere, commissioned by the Yale Repertory Theater in 2014.

The body the audience sees lying unconscious in a hospital bed upon entering, is actually just a prop representing a woman named Roberta, who collapsed with a stroke while viewing the apes at the Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington D.C.

The emergency has necessitated a reunion between her daughter, Joanne (Rachel Nicks), and son, Tate (Chris Myers), who are not on the best of terms. Among other issues, Tate resents what he considers to be Joanne's lack of ambition. The two of them were raised in a well-to-do black family and Tate, a political operative, thinks it's Rachel's obligation to take advantage of her education an opportunities for a successful career instead of raising a child with her white schoolteacher husband, Malcolm (Reggie Gowland).

The other source of tension is that there's a middle-aged woman whom neither of them know, and who doesn't speak English, sitting bedside and watching after their mother. A text from Malcolm says he found a strange man in Roberta's home.

It turns out that the pair are a mother and son from Germany. The loud and physically imposing Tobias (Austin Durant) explains that his mother Elfriede (very sweet and serene Michele Shay), is Roberta's half-sister, conceived when their father was stationed in Germany at the end of World WAR II.

Tobias is extremely upset, not because of Roberta's condition, but because, he says, she was going to sign a legal document that afternoon giving Elfriede a large portion of the money she inherited from their father. He explains that the two half-sisters had been corresponding long distance and that the two of them have been staying with Roberta. This is the first Tate and Joanne have heard of any of this, and, naturally, it seems suspicious.

Meanwhile, Roberta, played with lilting charm by Charlayne Woodard, exists in a limbo populated by apes. The leader among them is Alpha (Lance Coadie Williams, who also plays a no-nonsense nurse) who signs conversation with her that is translated by supertitles.

As characters debate issues of communication and identity, Blain-Cruz's graceful production smoothly transitions from the real to the surreal, as the playwright's intriguing situation twists and turns.