Cooking up comedy: Smart and fast-paced 'Clyde's' comes to the Vortex Theatre

From Friday, May 16, to June 8, the Vortex Theatre will present “Clyde’s,” a smart, fast-paced comedy set in a Pennsylvania truck stop, written by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage, and featuring a largely Black cast.

“‘Clyde’s’ came out in 2021. It centers on the lives of a handful of people who were formally incarcerated, and they’re working in a kitchen that is led by a really tough cookie named Clyde,” director Marya Errin Jones said. “Everybody has dreams and ambitions in this play, whether it’s love, whether it’s becoming a chef or whether it is simply making the best sandwich ever.”

Jones said that “Clyde’s” was the most performed play of 2021, although, to her knowledge, this will be its first New Mexico production. But local audiences may be familiar with Nottage’s other work, including “Sweat,” which the Santa Fe Playhouse put on last year.

Jones emphasized that “Clyde’s” is a comedy.

“It is deceptive. You might think that because it features people who were formerly in prison that it is a drama and that it’s tearjerking. It’s not. It’s hilarious, and there are lots of laughs,” she said.

The title role will be played by two actresses on different nights, Jenelle Baptiste and Angela Littleton, so audiences who return multiple times will be treated to an entirely different interpretation of the character.

“To be honest, there aren’t a lot of plays that feature Black women in them, and there aren’t a lot of Black women actors in the state of New Mexico,” Jones said. “Therefore, I felt inspired to have two Clydes to show the diversity and variation of performance, and to also lessen the stigma of one ‘strong Black woman’ — to show that there’s a variety of Black women.”

The trope of the “strong Black woman” has been heavily criticized by scholars in recent years as an unrealistic ideal that has had detrimental effects on Black women’s physical and mental health.

“Clyde is a powerful Black woman, not just a strong Black woman,” Jones said. “She also has a story we don’t know. We don’t know how she ended up the way she is. But the play pushes against this idea of the ‘strong Black woman’ or the ‘angry Black woman,’ because it’s really about the conditions of the heart.”

“I am a Black woman who’s directing the show, so that’s also kind of an anomaly in New Mexico, but not in the world,” Jones said. “So, that’s why I wanted to do this play … and to focus our attention on storytelling and character.”

Jones said the comedy in “Clyde’s” comes from the pacing.

“The faster you go, the funnier things are. When people can get lost in actions, they get lost in the story,” she said. “It’s important to not let the trauma become the story. To avoid that, we need to be living in the moment, making these sandwiches, ringing the bell, doing things. There’s so much physical action. They’re talking, they’re moving. And these are the reasons we can let ourselves escape the gravity of their situations.”

Not only is speed the secret to the play’s comedy, it’s also how the characters cope psychologically with the challenges in their lives.

“Ralph Waldo Emerson said, ‘In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.’ So, yeah, we’re on thin ice in various situations in reality,” Jones said.

Some characters in the play have more power than others, and some are more stressed than others, so she has them move at different speeds and with different blocking.

“I’ve been thinking about moving in straight lines and moving in curves, and who gets to have those different timelines. The folks who are working in the kitchen have to talk and work pretty fast, you know, before they’re interrupted by the boss,” Jones said. “In the kitchen, they’re living at a high rate of burn.”

On the other hand, the whole play takes place in what Jones calls a “liminal” space of “dreaming,” and sometimes the action slows down enough for the characters to imagine futures for themselves.

Those moments, Jones said, reminded her of the classic Hindu text, “The Bhagavad Gita,” where, in the midst of an epic and bloody battle, a warrior and his charioteer pause for a lengthy, digressive conversation about yoga and philosophy.

“I’ve been reading the ‘Gita’ since I was a teenager. Just fascinated by it,” Jones said. “So, it just dropped into my brain, like, Yes, of course this is where this (play) is set. It’s the philosophy of sandwich making in the war zone of the kitchen.”

For a brief time in her youth, Jones herself had a job making sandwiches.

“So, this is like full circle for me,” she said. “I thought back to what I was thinking about back then. You know, trying not to slip on a fallen tomato. But really it was like, hurry up, make it slow down, wait, here comes another customer. And that’s life.”

The play will have a brief intermission, but no sandwiches will be served.

Cooking up comedy: Smart and fast-paced 'Clyde's' comes to the Vortex Theatre

Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the Albuquerque Journal. He covers music, visual arts, books and more. You can reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal.com.