Can we declare a moratorium on meta musicals about the act of writing a musical? I’ve admired shows like Tick, Tick… Boom!, A Strange Loop, and [title of show] but at some point one grows tired about watching the act of creation rather than its byproduct. César Alvarez’s The Potluck, a coproduction of Soho Rep and Intar playing at Peter Jay Sharp Theater at Playwrights Horizons, gets mired in the challenges of its composition.
The thing is, Alvarez has a compelling story to tell: the 1979 massacre of five members of the Communist Workers Party during an anti-KKK rally in Greensboro, North Carolina. The killers, members of the Klan and the local Nazi party and abetted by local police and the FBI, were never convicted. Alvarez’s parents were union organizers, post-Vietnam War progressives, and Communist Workers Party members who soon named their newborn for one of the victims, Cesar Cauce. This is not fodder for your typical stage musical, but shows like Parade and Assassins have mined dark true-life subject matter to great effect. And Alvarez has composed a score, performed by an onstage band of nine (many of whom also play various characters), that offers an eclectic jambalaya of genres, from jazz to folk to rock.
When Alvarez sticks to the history — including a seven-minute video clip of the massacre itself that was used in a 1981 documentary film co-directed by his mother, Sally Alvarez — they succeed in bringing an under-reported tragedy to life, as well as the people who worked diligently to advance the rights of workers and regular people. The show asks us to grapple with difficult questions like the victims’ possible culpability in their deaths (by taunting Klansmen with “Death to the Klan” chants), and to weigh the shortcomings of left-wing organizations that long barred LGBTQ people from their movement.
Alvarez, who identifies as queer and nonbinary, introduces a proxy character onstage (played by Anthony Alfaro with an onstage confidence that belies the character’s supposed confusion). For much of the overlong first act, we watch the Alvarez stand-in fixate on the challenges of writing a musical about the Greensboro massacre — dealing with the nonprofit that commissioned the piece, a college intern who wants course credit and maybe a paycheck (Jasmine Rafael), an online yoga instructor who serves mostly as a procrastination device (El Beh), and parents who gently inquire about the status of the project.
The elder Alvarezes also offer the sharpest critiques of the resulting work. “We’re not so into your navel-gazing stuff,” says dad (Rubén Flores), a Cuban refugee still working on progressive causes. Mom (Barbara Walsh), meanwhile, diplomatically offers this assessment: “You know I adore you, but I don’t know if your particular kind of art is able to make any contribution to this awful history.”
And there’s the rub. Too often, Alvarez and director Sarah Benson get in the way of the story with many detours into solipsism, including a full production number where the cast become plus-size mops in glow-in-the-dark orange swaying to choreography by Ana Maria Alvarez. (Qween Jean designed the costumes, which are lit by Mextly Couzin on Emily Orling’s subdivided platform set.) This is meant to be a giant phantasmagorical metaphor for cleaning out the poison and toxicity of society — or something. Like many of the show’s lyrics and dialogue (which are all projected on the back wall), the scene is visually intriguing, thematically muddy, and goes on too long.
The show is on sturdier ground when it sticks to the subject at hand. At the end of the first act, the five fallen party members sing an updated version of “The Buffalo Skinners” folk song, and we begin to see them for the first time as individuals worthy of memorializing. We hear more from them in the second act, which is when Alvarez also delivers the show’s two strongest songs, ballads that offer contrasting views of the struggle for social justice. First, Walsh’s mother character articulates a kind of wistful despair at how much in the world still needs fixing. “There is a myth held up by another myth / And it’s hard to mess with the myth you’re held up with.”
Moments later, Flores pauses while making a vegetarian paella on the onstage stove to sing a song directly to his long-dead friend Cesar, a kind of voicemail to the dead about all that he has missed since 1979. That includes AIDS, the 9/11 attacks, and the Iraq War — but also the fall of the Berlin Wall, the technological innovations, and Nelson Mandela’s election as president of South Africa. “We never would have predicted that,” he sings in a plaintive voice full of wonder and reflection. “There is this giant conversation happening on computers between nearly everyone on earth. It is a mess and it’s incredible.” In a few words, this song encapsulates the mixed blessings of our current age. And of this show, which contains elements that are both messy and incredible. ★★★☆☆
THE POTLUCK
Soho Rep at Playwrights Horizons, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes (with one intermission)
Tickets on sale through August 2 for $35