"Clyde's," a dark comedy by Lynn Nottage, is about self-forgiveness and redemption.
It's also about sandwiches. The cast assembles, onstage during the course of the play, 24 sandwiches, five of which are actually edible (and eaten). The others consist of very realistic looking latex meat, cheese and tomatoes.
The play centers on the kitchen staff of a truck-stop cafe, all of whom have been formerly incarcerated and are fighting for a second chance at life, improving themselves while attempting to improve the restaurant by dreaming up perfect sandwiches -- and while doing their best to avoid the wrath of the cafe's cynical, eponymous owner.
It's onstage at Little Rock's Arkansas Repertory Theatre -- tonight's performance is the second of two previews; Friday is opening night and the show runs through June 25. It closes out the Rep's 2023-24 season, the final fall-summer lineup for the theater, which shifts to a summer-only schedule in 2024.
The show is a co-production with the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in that state's capital of Montgomery, where it ran May 12-28, and in partnership with the Equal Justice Initiative.
Director Josiah Davis says the cast toured the initiative's Legacy Museum in Montgomery before starting rehearsals. (They also visited a Montgomery restaurant called Martha's Place Buffet where, according to its website, its eponymous owner "only hires folks who are down on their luck, just as she once was.")
The museum's focus is "From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration"; it occupies the site of a former warehouse where Black people were forced to labor and immerses visitors "in the sights and sounds of the slave trade, racial terrorism, the Jim Crow South and the world's largest prison system," according to its website.
Davis' task this past week in shifting the production westward is to re-block it from Alabama Shakespeare's thrust stage, with the audience on three sides, to the Rep's forward-facing proscenium stage. Jean Kim's set is in essence a working kitchen, including a functional sink from which the actors can draw water to wash down their bites of sandwich.
The show is a homecoming for Little Rock native Phyllis Yvonne Stickney, who plays the title role. "Miss S.," as she prefers to be called, is making her second appearance on the Rep stage -- she played Lena Younger in the 2011 production of Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun."
"That was my first time working on my hometown stage," she says. It drew "great numbers," she says and encouraged new subscribers to the Rep.
Stickney rose to prominence first by winning Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 1986, and subsequently appearing in the ABC-TV miniseries "The Women of Brewster Place" alongside Cicely Tyson and Oprah Winfrey. Essence magazine honored her in its 25th anniversary issue as one of 200 African American women who have changed the world. She was inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame in 1998.
As for "Clyde's," she explains, "Each one [of the kitchen workers] presents their sandwich to the sensei, or the Buddha" -- Montrellous, the head chef, played by Michael A. Shepperd, who is also making his second appearance at the Rep (he was one of three cast members of "The Whipping Man" in 2015).
As each sandwich makes its appearance, says Brendan D. Hickey, who plays kitchen worker Jason, "We all take a bite."
"The sandwiches look beautiful," says the sensei. "The audience will say, 'I want a bite of that.'"
Not every sandwich is an unmitigated success. Shepperd says the audience usually gets a laugh at his facial expression after he samples the "masterpiece" produced by Alinca Hamilton's Letitia. And sometimes, he admits, "The lettuce sticks to the top of your mouth."
Alfredo Antillon rounds out the cast as Rafael. No description of his sandwich was available.
The play deals with some serious issues -- the preschool-to-prison-pipeline and the way, "fairly or mostly unfairly, people of color, especially Black people, are treated within this system," Shepperd says -- it carries a positive message, Hamilton adds: "These people are at a point in their lives where they can go in one direction or another. They're trying to find a way to move forward."
And, Shepperd notes, "It is a comedy. It is a dark comedy, but it is very funny and very uplifting."
"It's so perfect to evoke what theater was designed to do," Stickney adds. "It offers not only belly laughter but 'heart' laughter."
It also contains, as Stickney notes, some pretty salty language -- salty enough to earn the production an "R" rating from the theater, though none of it, she insists, is gratuitous: "That's the way people like this talk," she explains.
Author Nottage, by the way, is the only woman to have received two Pulitzer Prizes for drama -- for "Drama" in 2009 and for "Sweat" in 2015.
Montrellous (Michael A. Shepperd) is "Clydes" kitchen "sensei." (Special to the Democrat-Gazette/Ann Little)
'Clydes
What: Dark comedy by Lynn Nottage
When: 7 p.m. Wednesday-Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday through June 25
Where: Arkansas Repertory Theatre, 601 Main St., Little Rock
Sponsors: Mary & Jim Wohlleb and Gen. (Ret.) & Mrs. Wesley K. Clark
Rating: R, for adult language and situations
Tickets: $30-$65 with discounts for senior citizens, educators, military, students and groups and for rush tickets
Information: (501) 378-0405; TheRep.org