Who knew the back half of the 2022/23 season would see such a plethora of puppets on Houston’s stages?
So far there’s been a reincarnated holy lama puppet, a struggling adopted boy puppet and a fantasy land king and queen depicted by, you guessed it, puppets. Three shows in total. It’s a lot for a city not exactly known for alternative modes of storytelling.
And now we can add a fourth show – Nathan Louis Jackson’s Brother Toad, now playing at Ensemble Theatre with direction by Rachel Hemphill Dickson and Eileen J. Morris.
But unlike the other instances of puppets standing in for human characters, here we have a metaphoric puppet, a stuffed animal really, inserted awkwardly for metaphoric purpose into a well-meaning but dramatically lacking play about race and gun violence.
As the play opens, we learn that Marquis (Tanner Ellis) and his friend, both young Black men, are the victims of a stand-your-ground shooting by a white perpetrator. While Marquis is only slightly wounded, his best friend is killed in the incident. The shooter? Out on bail and probably not going to spend any jail time.
Now Marquis’ Uncle Randall (Nicholas Lewis), a sports radio call-in host and his pregnant school teacher wife Shayna (Aria Hope), newly moved to a safer neighborhood to get away from violence, want to organize a peaceful protest calling for justice and gun safety. A protest meant to be firearm-free until Randall’s gun-owning friend Chris (Roc Living) suggests that a rally with no way to defend yourself against the expected counter-protesters is foolish.
Meanwhile, Marquis and his mother Janelle (An’tick Von Morphixing) aren’t even sure they want to participate at all. Marquis because he’s tired of being the poster boy for racial justice and Janelle because she fears for her son’s safety. More so when she hears that there will be guns allowed.
So where do the stuffies/puppets fit into this whole thing?
They’re born of the fable that Shayna tells her students about Brother Toad who never sleeps because he knows a snake is coming after him. A metaphor for those without guns and the temptation to buy them as protection against everyone else who seems to own them and may harm you or yours.
Easy to see why Jackson wrote the reptiles into the script – they an apt, if overly neat metaphor for the point he’s trying to make – namely we get weapons out of fear for who else has weapons and then end up with the power to both protect and kill.
It’s all fine perhaps on paper, but in production, it doesn’t fly. Not with a large stuffed, rather cute snake being thrust out from behind a curtain to wiggle around in dim light while characters hallucinate potential victimhood due to home invasions or parking lot shootings.
However ill-conceived the puppets are in the production; they aren’t the major issue with the show. That lies with the script itself which suffers terribly from the issue-play trap of lecturing instead of dramatizing.
Jackson writes scene after scene of thoughtfully talky gun rights/responsibility debates that allow for many shades of grey, but neglects to give us any actual drama on stage.
To say that nothing happens in this show is an understatement. Instead, we get 90 minutes worth of discussion about what has happened and what might happen and a frustratingly inconclusive ending that feels like dropped threads.
Perhaps itself a metaphor for the circular/never-ending debate on gun safety in this country, but unfortunately here metaphor dulls what could have been an emotionally urgent play.
The issues are there and they are both worthy and interesting, Brother Toad just needs to heed the old theater maxim, show don’t tell and we’ll be far more invested.
Brother Toad continues through June 4 at Ensemble Theatre, 3535 Main. For more informaiton, call 713-520-0055 or visit ensemblehouston.com $34-$53.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
