Review: FURLOUGH'S PARADISE at Geffen Playhouse

There are moments within The Geffen Playhouse’s production of a.k. payne’s FURLOUGH’S PARADISE where the audience gets the opportunity to take a deep, restorative breath. Not so very many, but they happen. In fact, one of the play’s two characters makes that very request in the first scene: “I just wanna breathe for a minute.” And she does, they both do, but the clock is ticking, in the moment and in a greater sense, and payne’s characters can’t fully enjoy that luxury. So neither, in this haunting but quite tender play, should we. The playwright studied under Geffen Playhouse Artistic Director Tarell Alvin McCraney at Yale. After he opened the Geffen’s season with a revival of his own family-centered drama THE BROTHERS SIZE, McCraney’s attraction to this play makes perfect sense. The two works nicely bookend each other.  

Per the playwright, FURLOUGH’S PARADISE is “an abolition play or perhaps simply a play about cousins.”  They’re right; it is both. Mina and Sade, the children of twin siblings, spend three days together. The cousins grew up together and were close but have drifted apart as their circumstances have taken them to different places – Mina to an Ivy Leage education, a high-paying job with Google and seeing the world, Sade to a far less privileged life. We encounter them having reunited for the funeral of Sade’s mother (Mina’s aunt), an occasion for which Sade has been given a three-day furlough from her prison sentence. So she’s crashing with her cousin. We don’t know what landed Sade behind bars; nor does it matter. For these 72 precious hours, she’s “free.”

Somewhat. Yes, she can shower by herself, eat Cookie Crisp cereal or watch an episode of The Fresh Prince or The Proud Family, but Sade is thinking bigger than that. As, in her own way, is Mina. The women share many bonds, not the least of which is their shared love of Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf.

This temporary safe space is Mina’s apartment, when she’s in town, which isn’t so often.  It’s old but decently kept up with a couch and bedroom bumped up against each other and an enormous shower, smoothly rendered by scenic designer Chika Shimizu. Other than a couple of dream sequences, the action never leaves this location. Sade has no burning desire to leave.  Not until she can really go out into the sun and find her utopia. And Mina returns to this place because, in part, it keeps her geographically close to Sade.

Admittedly the reunion isn’t all paradise. The cousins clash over perceived injustices both existing and in the past. Both are dealing with loneliness, with feeling displaced and not accepted. The interplay between Kacie Rogers’ Mina and DeWanda Wise’s Sade is complicated, messy but ultimately suffused with love. Director Tinashe Kajese-Bolden and choreographer Dell Howlett package this two-hander with a mixture of tenderness and bitterness, making sure – largely through some special effects – that the larger themes hit with force.

The two characters may present and speak differently – ‘De a bitter wall of toughness; Mina a Silicon Valley do-gooder -  but they’re more alike than not, and that shared blood is a powerful bond. Both are queer and in relationships. One has had a child, the other is now considering it. Both have scars from the past that are not healing anytime soon.  And both are thinking hard about what it means to be liberated – from prison, from gender limitations, from cultural expectations, from everything. When it gets dark and the bad visions come, they are there to build a fort like the one they played in as children (a lovely stage effect) and to hold onto each other.  

The push-pull dynamic between Rogers and Wise is lovely to behold.  Characters this damaged and boxed in can be difficult to spend extended time with, but both actors provide plenty of windows into their longing and shared grief. The furlough must end, and before it does, the cousins will make poignant requests of each other. “Please don’t stop including me in your utopia,” Mina says to ‘De. “Find you some love who can hold you,” counters ‘De to her cousin.” Check and check. And try not to get choked up as you hear it.

FURLOUGH’S PARADISE plays through May 18 at 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood.