Harvard Theater

Written and directed by David Lee

In Bolyston Auditorium tonight and tomorrow

SENIOR David Lee bills Them, his blessedly short one act, as "a race-reversal play." Set in Savannah, Ga. in the 1950's, it attempts to confound our old notions of Black and white. That's a fine ambition, but all Lee and his small cast succeed in doing is reversing some flimsy stereotypes and confounding the audience with an unimpressive production.

Lee puts a major, if easy, twist on history in Them: African pilgrims--not Europeans--colonized and settled this country, bringing over European slaves. But instead of letting this not-so-clever premise unfold with some dramatic grace or subtlety, Lee has a narrator explain the wider historical circumstances in deadening detail. Like the rest of the play, this opening lacks the imagination and care that its themes suggest and demand.

The play focuses on two groups in a segregated waiting area of Savannah's train depot. On one bench sit The Marshalls, a stiff and respectable Black family--Mother (Erika Dilday), Father (Mark Awobuluyi) and teenage daughter Bridget (Elizabeth Wint). Two lower-class "white boys," Jackie Saunders (Steve Barr) and Benny Jones (Scott Chavez), eye them from across the bare stage, whispering and wondering "what it's like to live like them."

Not surprisingly, they don't find out. Neither do we, mainly because Lee works with silly dialogue and stock situations. At one point, the Black patriarch reiterates white segregationist arguments and then, moments later, discovers that daughter Bridget has been having an affair with Billy Brown, the white housemaid's boy. He flies off in a rage, swearing revenge upon the poor kid. These actors do their best with this warp-speed melodrama and even manage a few comic moments, but Lee's material doesn't allow any great depth of characterization.

From their "For Non-Blacks" bench, the two white figures ogle after Bridget, whom they call an "African princess." With their spirited readings of such lines as "Oooohwhee!!" and "I hears you," Barr and Chavez consistently overact, and their larger-than-life gestures and exaggerated Southern accents make them offensive caricatures.

To make matters worse, the scenes are separated by long stretches of darkness filled in by an uninspiring tape of blues guitar improvisation.

All in all, Them resembles an honest but weak playwrighting exercise in role-, rather than race-, reversal. It skirts the issues of history, class and color that its premise seems to raise. It might be better to avoid Them.