February 10-16, 2005

theater

Top Story

Fake accompli? Pamela Isaacs as Pat and Brienin Bryant as Yvonne in Tracey Scott Wilson's The Story.

by Toby Zinman

The Story begins without much energy: actors talk slowly (exasperatingly so), characters telegraph themes (yeah, yeah, yeah, another play about racism). But director Maria Mileaf soon picks up the pace, ideas expand and the complexity of characters' motives increases exponentially. Before I knew it, I was hooked, thoroughly engrossed and, finally, genuinely shocked.

Tracey Scott Wilson based her play on the 1980-81 scandal when it was discovered that Janet Cooke, who won the Pulitzer Prize for a story she wrote for the Washington Post about a young heroin addict, had made the story up and, further, that she falsified her credentials on her resumé. She was disgraced, and the humiliated Post had to return the ill-gotten Pulitzer.

But Wilson's story about an ambitious African-American journalist goes far beyond journalistic fraud. It begins when a young couple teaching for Teach America get lost in the very same dangerous neighborhood they work in, and the husband is shot and killed. The reporter, eager for a big break, goes after the story as her ticket out of covering community centers and into hard news. Her boyfriend, who is white, is an editor and finds himself caught in the crossfire.

The entire cast is impressive, but several stand out. Brienin Bryant, in the central role of the reporter, is superbly slippery. Her story's teenage subject, Danai Gurira as Latisha, shifts from believable to unbelievable over and over again. Pamela Isaacs, as the embattled black editor of the hard-won black life section of the newspaper, plays on our expectations of her "type," and Miriam Hyman slides among her many ensemble roles with impressive ease.

Given that there have been so many recent journalistic scandals (most publicized were Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair), and given the general disgust and mistrust the media now evokes in the nevertheless insatiable public, any plot that turns on the revelation that a journalist is disreputable would hardly provoke more than a yawn. The Story turns on far more than sleaze; it offers characters who grow more complex throughout the play, so no snap judgment stands. The betrayals and self-betrayals, manipulations and self-delusions pile up. That theater depends on the illusions it creates makes "keepin' it real" an especially fruitful issue. The racial attitudes here are far too interesting for any easy "yeah, yeah, yeah."

THE STORY Through Feb. 27, Philadelphia Theatre Co. at Plays & Players Theater, 1714 Delancey St., 215-985-0420