Humana: The How We Got On Review

Brian Quijada and Terrell Donnell Sledge in Idris Goodwin's How We Got On at the Actors Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival through April 1.

How We Got On

Written by Idris Goodwin. Directed by Wendy C. Goldberg.

Through April 1 at the Actors Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival.

The concept of suburban hipsters in derided “fly-over states” falling for the coastal urban culture tropes disseminated by MTV Raps! has been plumbed before, from a brilliant Danny Hoch sketch to superficial Saturday Night Live routines. Playwright Idris Goodwin, who as a New York-schooled Break Beat Poet who’s taught in Iowa would seem to have a special grasp of his subject matter here, finds a comin-of-age drama in what to others has been an anachronistic joke about Nikes in the cornfields.

Goodwin crafts a number of credible scenes around how rap fans meet, circle each other warily and ultimately band together. But he falls prey to other social stereotypes that keep his young characters from unleashing their loudest voices. Making the female element of the teen drama a prim girl in a school uniform really puts her at a disadvantage, as does not introducing her at all until a third of the way through the play (even though she admits later on that she was present at a formative event in How We Got On’s first act.)

All three teen protagonists—that tidy young woman Luann (Deonna Bouye, reserved and restrained), the skittish and unsure lyricist Hank (Terrell Donnell Sledge) and his aggressive Latino friend/frontman Julian (Brian Quijada)—are given overachieving, domineering parents with a disdain for their kids’ tastes in music. Where they live in the suburbs is made potent while grander issues of race and culture are downplayed.

Goodwin also wants to instruct the play’s audiences in the history of hip-hop, which he does through some awkward reference-laden dialogue but especially through the interlocution of a omniscient overlooking DJ dubbed Selector. Crystal Fox excels in this tricky part, which requires her to teach, spin discs and assume multiple supporting roles in the drama. She’d given way too much to do, and you often don’t know what’s up—like, whether one of the incipient rap crew’s rhymes and beats are supposed to be any good or not—until she tells you.

I got the feeling that Goodwin doesn’t think regional theater audiences venture into hip-hop clubs, or watch MTV for that matter. That may in fact be the case with the middle-aged white Louisville crowd I saw this show with, or with the New London, Ct., audience which attended an earlier workshop at the Eugene O’Neill Center. Personally, I felt talked down to. I found the ubiquitous historical rap references lightweight and chronologically scattered—they bogged down the drama (ostensibly set in the late 1980s) rather than illuminating it. As for whether Hank’s and Julian’s and Luann’s raps are meant to be honestly exceptional, or if these kids just think they’re great, well, that’s probably the most interesting debate which comes out of this interestingly structured by largely conventional teens-with-dreams drama.