Review Roundup: CRUMBS FROM THE TABLE OF JOY at Keen Company

Keen Company's Crumbs from the Table of Joy by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage just celebrated its opening night. Directed by Colette Robert, this revival is the first New York production since the play's 1995 premiere, which marked Nottage's professional debut.

Set against the social politics of the 1950s, this charming, funny, and moving play follows 17-year-old Ernestine Crump as she adjusts to life after the passing of her beloved mother. In search of spiritual answers, Ernestine's father relocates the family from Pensacola to Brooklyn where the Crumps must navigate a changing family dynamic, an unwelcoming neighborhood, and a shifting set of American ideals. Crumbs From The Table of Joy questions the limits of escapism and the power of everyday hope.

The cast for Crumbs From The Table of Joy includes Shanel Bailey (The Book of Mormon), Jason Bowen (The Play That Goes Wrong), Sharina Martin (The Piano Lesson), Natalia Payne (Fairview), and Malika Samuel (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Once on This Island).

Let's see what the critics had to say...

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Laura Collins-Hughes, New York Times: In Colette Robert's quiet, mostly sure-handed production for Keen Company, "Crumbs From the Table of Joy" is a pleasure for several reasons: rarity, for one, this being the play's first New York revival since its premiere in 1995. There's also the fun of spotting - in a work that feels, improbable as it sounds, like a cousin to Neil Simon's "Brighton Beach Memoirs" - glimmers of plays to come in Nottage's oeuvre. Ernestine's silver-screen fantasies bring to mind the satire "By the Way, Meet Vera Stark" (2011), about a trailblazing Black actress in Golden Age Hollywood. And Ernestine's dressmaker's dummy, draped with her graduation gown in progress, prefigures "Intimate Apparel" (2003).

Elysa Gardner, New York Sun: The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage has drawn inspiration from subjects ranging from civil war in the Congo to tensions among Pennsylvania factory workers to the poaching of elephants in Kenya. For "Crumbs from the Table of Joy," which marked her professional debut as a playwright back in 1995, Ms. Nottage looked no further than her native Brooklyn - in geographic terms, that is.

Melissa Rose Bernardo, New York Stage Review: If you're familiar with Nottage's works, you're sure to notice a few details in Crumbs that surface in other plays. Starting over in Brooklyn-that's something the title character does in Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine. We see Ernie working on her graduation dress, pinning and nipping and tucking on a sewing mannequin; Esther in Intimate Apparel is a seamstress by trade. Ernie is passionate about movies; Nottage later wrote a comedy, By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, skewering the film industry. But Crumbs has a voice all its own. It also has one of the most jaw-dropping Act 1 endings you'll ever see.

Sandy MacDonald, New York Stage Review: Plenty of fledgling playwrights test their wings with an autobiographical memory play. Lynne Nottage's delightful freshman effort (1995), about a Southern widower and his two teenage girls adjusting to life as Brooklyn transplants in 1950, might read like one, but it actually represents a huge leap from her own upbringing among Boerum Hill intelligentsia. At age 31 (six years after she emerged from the playwriting program at Yale Drama), Nottage's ear was sharp, her empathy deep, her sense of humor already well honed.

Howard Miller, Talkin' Broadway: To be clear, Crumbs From the Table of Joy is a fledgling work, so don't go expecting the level of intensity to be found in Nottage's later powerhouse dramas like Ruined and Sweat, her two Pulitzer winners from, respectively, 2009 and 2017. But this is a great opportunity to catch someone on the cusp of breaking through to the big time, even then a writer with a keen literary ear who can make us sit up and take notice within the first few lines: "Death made us nauseous with regret. It wouldn't leave us be, tugging at our stomachs and our throats."

Photo Credit: Julieta Cervantes

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