NYPD FAMILY BLUES
I fell for the solid, paternal, irascible Walter “Pops” Washington immediately over his whiskey breakfast, as he listens half-patiently to the unreliably recovering addict Oswaldo prating about his latest health kick. He knows that won’t last – though not how personally dangerous it could get, lodging random lowlifes rent-free. But he gives Oswaldo a chance, alongside his own petty-criminal son Junior and fiancee; the latter wandering through their kitchen in short shorts and bending at the fridge as the old man expostulates “Full moon rising! Lulu, mind your hindquarters!” . He and Oswaldo think she’s a bit “retarded”, Junior insists she is an accountancy student. Walter doubts this, given that her lips move when she read the horoscopes.
We are meant to fall for the old boy, benign widowed patriarch in a salty working-class New York, as he later puts it “A feeble old patiotic, tax-paying, African American ex cop war hero senior citizen” . And Danny Sapani makes it easy to love Walter as a good ol’ boy, before his complications and the driving force of the play become clear. This is an actor who can make his creations both endear and infuriate, able both to simmer and explode, sometimes briefly terrify. Remember his recent Lear..
It’s all going to happen, because eventually (the playwright Stephen Adly Guargis likes to take it slow and gradually, drawing us into the family) we will learn what it is he and Junior (a strong Martins Imhangbe) were briefly bickering about alongside the normal family irritation at one’s son stashing stolen goods in the bedroom. For old Walter is eight years into a lawsuit which, Junior says, “ everyone knows you shoulda settled no fault with the city years ago”. A longtime cop with all the bruises and conflicts of a hard city (“everyone hates cops. Cops hate cops”) he was shot, in a lowlife club off duty, by a rookie white cop. Who called him “N——r” with a bullet for every letter. And he won’t settle. Nor will City Hall.
The play predates the seismic cultural changes of BLM, and one suspects that today the NYPD would be more likely to come down hard on the white cop: anything to avoid the long attrition of decent old Walter’s claim. And it may be that Walter, being where he was and acting however he did (we never quite know) bears some responsibility for things heating up. There are electrically charged confrontations with Daniel Lapaine as a white younger Lieutenant trying to get him to settle, and Judith Roddy as a young white detective who worked long ago alongside Walter and loves him. But he is adamant, stubborn on his honour, to the point of derangement.
It’s a constantly, evolvingly gripping evening, Michael Longhurst’s direction never letting it flag for a moment. There are perhaps a few almost surreal improbabilities, especially a very funny (and it turns out, pivotal) encounter with Ayesha Antoine as a dodgy ‘church lady” with a sexual ’n voodoo edge. The satisfaction of the play is the way it hovers on the edge of tragedy, creeps closer then steps back with an unexpected laugh. It won a Pulitzer, quite right too.
I see from the notebook that at one point late on I anxiously scrawled “sign the deal, Walter!”in pure empathy. It’s good to get drawn that deep into a play. It’s why we go.
hampsteadtheatre.com. to 15 June
Rating 4
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