Stage Review: Race Relations Fire Up “Dutch Masters”

Left to right: Corey Dorris and Josh Zuckerman. (Photo: John Perrin Flynn)

Greg Keller’s Dutch Masters, which is receiving an intense and well-crafted West Coast premiere at Rogue Machine Theatre under the direction of Guillermo Cienfuegos, bears superficial resemblance to Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story. Both plays are set in New York City. Both portray an encounter between two individuals, one of whom is angry and aggressive and bent on interrogating the other, a passive stranger trying desperately to mind his own business. In each, there’s the threat of imminent violence throughout and a suspense that springs from never knowing if and when the volatile character will erupt.

But whereas in Albee’s play we never learn precisely what makes Jerry, the aggressive dude, tick, in Dutch Masters Keller makes the source of that ire clear and specific, and spends the entire second half of this 80-minute one-act illuminating where it comes from.

And, much more significantly, whereas Albee’s play traditionally involves two white guys, Keller’s features a white man and a black one, with the issue of race, as well as class, up front and center.

The play is set in 1992, and opens on a subway traveling north from Manhattan to the Bronx. Steve (Josh Zuckerman), middle-class and white, is reading War of the Worlds, and intent on ignoring the obstreperous behavior of a lanky black man, distinctly non-middle-class, who seems to be eyeing him from across the aisle. Steve’s trepidations are realized when the man, Eric (Corey Dorris, in an impressive stage debut), approaches him and begins asking questions that might be innocuous were it not for the rather menacing in-your-face body language he’s sporting. Intimidated, and afraid to be deemed racist, Steve agrees to accompany Eric to score weed instead of heading home as he had planned.

After stopping off in (from Steve’s standpoint) a dicey neighborhood where they obtain the smoke, then get high, the pair end up in Eric’s shabby digs, and Steve finally learns the whys and wherefores of this anxiety-provoking misadventure, which is not the random event he had assumed it to be.

The details of his discovery (which I won’t spoil) are ultimately less intriguing than the discomforting gambol which continues to take place between the two men, as Steve, a suburban college kid, fights to control a palpable unease born of white guilt, while Eric struggles with a gut impulse to violently vent on his unwilling guest a rage born of perceived deprivation and loss.

Like Greg Kalleres’ Honky, another play about race, which Rogue Machine staged this past spring, Dutch Masters forces us (sophisticated urban theatergoers that we are) to acknowledge feelings and fears we’d rather not. But while Kalleres’ play was a satire, Dutch Masters hovers headily close to reality. The performances accentuate that realism: Dorris, adeptly mastering his character’s unpredictable shifts from friendly comradery to outright menace (to, later, genuine sorrow), and Zuckerman in the less showy but equally exacting role of someone on an emotional tightrope. That the show flows so seamlessly and with nuanced pacing is to director Cienfuegos’ great credit.

Scenic designer and technical director David A. Mauer engineers a remarkable set change mid-production, and the percussive sound that precedes the show (designed by Christopher Moscatiello) augurs the edgy ambiance of what’s to come.

MET Theatre, 1089 N. Oxford Avenue, East Hollywood; Sat. & Mon., 8:30 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; through Oct. 3. roguemachinetheatre.com/show-info/dutch-masters.