`Jar the Floor': treading on contentious ground

Theater review

"Jar the Floor" by Cheryl West. Directed by Gilbert McCauley. Tuesday-Sunday through Oct. 28 at Seattle Repertory Theatre, Seattle. $10-$42. 206-443-2222.

Guilt is the gift that keeps on giving. And seeking approval from parents who are loath to bestow it can be a lifelong job.

For a pungent demonstration of the above, check out Cheryl West's entertaining and touching African- American mother-daughter saga, "Jar the Floor."

Set in a tony Chicago suburb, the play opens on the 90th birthday of family matriarch MaDear (Marilyn Coleman). Gathered to celebrate the occasion, and pick on one another, are MaDear's blowzy daughter, Lola (Emily Yancy), Lola's uptight college professor offspring, MayDee (Sharon Washington), and MayDee's rebellious daughter, Vennie (Terrilynn Towns) - four generations of single black women, entangled in bonds of wary love and fierce resentment.

There are enough chips on this clan's shoulders to supply a casino. And there is more than enough blame to go around, when the disses and accusations start to fly.

Boisterous, earthy, enraged and insightful, "Jar the Floor" had its world premiere at Seattle's Empty Space Theatre in 1991, well before similar themes were explored in such films as "Soul Food" and "Eve's Bayou." Culturally specific, yet broadly accessible, West's play went on to many regional productions and a successful run Off-Broadway.

The production currently at Seattle Repertory Theatre sports a tweaked script, a vigorous cast under original director Gilbert McCauley's guidance (including two excellent veterans in their roles, Coleman and Yancy) and an upscale set by Kate Edmunds. But "Jar the Floor" still mashes up bawdy wisecracking with blunt pathos, and rigs up a furious four-way generation clash fueled by unresolved resentments and unmet needs.

At its coarser and sudsier junctures, the play might pass for a bawdy Fox Network sitcom. But while these women are caricatured, there's still a lot of substance to them - and to West's depiction of how, in many American families, each generation re-invents itself in opposition to the previous one.

Though she slips in and out of senile reveries, Coleman's watchful MaDear draws from a shrewd store of wisdom in her hilarious lucid moments. And she is the family's last poignant link to its rural Mississippi past.

By contrast, Yancy's lusty Lola wants nothing to do with that dirt-poor legacy. So male-fixated and vain she won't be called Grandma, Lola is a rugged urban survivor who grabs pleasure as it comes.

Washington's tense MayDee has suffered the consequences of that, and chosen a very different path as a workaholic academic. Unsurprisingly, Towns' tattooed, pierced and irreverent young Vennie rejects her mother's well-laid plans for her, and feels more kinship with Lola and MaDear.

To her credit, West doesn't provide neat resolutions to thorny quarrels, and she keeps ambiguous the relationship between Vennie and her genial white friend Raisa (played with much heart and warmth by Alexis Chamow).

Raisa's breast cancer is handled here with more subtlety than in the original production, as are the accusations of sexual abuse and other psychic bombshells that get dropped.

The ending, however, still gives a touching glimpse of relations rising above the old hurts to affirm their mutual strength and survival. "Jar the floor" is a down-home term for rattling the floorboards, making your presence felt. And that's just what West's flawed, familiar and irrepressible family of women do.