‘Generations’ Performance Just Whets Your Appetite for More

Shyko Amos, Khail Toi Bryant and Thuli Dumakude in a scene from “Generations." Photo: Julieta Cervantes

A corner of South Africa is currently installed on Walker Street at Soho Rep. With rough red earth underfoot, walls covered in rusty corrugated iron and laundry drying overhead, the entire theatre has been transformed into a family’s disheveled but well-used kitchen.

The best seats in the house are overturned buckets—some of them empty industrial-sized containers for cooking oil. A mouthwatering aroma of cooking wafts all the way out to the street and much of the actors’ time on stage is spent cooking. What’s served up, however, is food for the soul rather than the stomach in “Generations,” a bite-sized play with music.

But while the searing performances as well as the stirring songs composed by Bongi Duma and sung by a choir of 13 are deeply moving, you have to ask why director Leah C. Gardiner devoted so much effort and talent to a 30-minute show. This nuanced, mesmerizing play and its powerful group of acapella singers just leaves you wanting more.

The action, which unfolds all around the buckets and benches where the audience sits, centers on three generations of a family as they cook and reminisce about the day one of the granddaughters was proposed to.

“He asked her if she could cook?” the girl’s mother says. “I coached her to cook, I did... I was the cooker—she was the cookless.” By the end of the play, audience members may have that line and most of the rest of the play down by heart because British playwright Debbie Tuc­ker Green’s script is circular and spare.

But as different characters take up the same words, they seem to convey different meaning and power. Playing with language is something of a trademark for Green, whose verbally distinctive play “Born Bad” was also performed at Soho Rep.

Here, the repetitive lines take on a poetic and elegiac nature that seems to be echoed when the choirs bursts into seemingly impromptu songs. The bass voices make those bucket seats reverberate nicely.

The future of the young lovers, played with tenderness by Mamoudou Athie and Shyko Amos, seems at first to depend on her culinary prowess. Each generation of the family has its claim to being the best cook. The young fiancée’s parents, portrayed with humor by Ntombikhona Dlamini and Michael Rogers, both vie for the title.

But the grandfather, in an emotional performance by Jonathan Peck, contradicts them all. He says he taught them all, including the grandma, the charismatic Thuli Dumakude, to cook. Without giving too much away, this play is not about cooking and the mood quickly turns from celebration to despair. Near the end, the grandparents are left alone on stage, while the rest of the family gradually melts into the choir.

Nothing is spelled out, but deep, generational tragedy, perhaps the AIDS crisis in South Africa, is alluded to. And that is why the play might benefit from expansion, to give the audience time to absorb the magnitude of its theme. As it stands, it’s a superb piece of experiential theatre that just whets the appetite.

“Generations” will be at Soho Rep, 46 Walker St,, sohorep.org., through Nov. 23.