“What if we actually said everything?” said playwright, producer, and actor Lena Waithe about the inspiration for her new brutally honest one-act play, “trinity,” at Center Stage in an extended run through March 15.
Waithe, who is known for “The Chi”, “Master of None,” and “Queen & Slim,” makes her stage debut as an actor and playwright with “trinity,”which explores intimate relationships, forgoing the sage narrative device every English professor loves: “trinity” is all tell and no show.
In “trinity,” Waithe breaks the fourth wall, characters rip open their hearts and say exactly what is on their mind, confessing feelings many would never admit to: feelings of jealousy, of superiority, of seeking people who will hurt us to fill the holes our parents never filled. In “trinity,” characters blurt sometimes accusatory truths to each other, forcing them to confront their insecurities and show how they are hurting one another.
“It’s like if Jean Paul Sartre and Adrienne Kennedy had a baby. If ‘Along Came Polly’ went out on a date with ‘Love Jones.’ It’s like German absurdism and French existentialism, it’s definitely the coolest thing I’ve ever worked on,” gushed Walker-Webb.
“I found myself falling through the layers of this play, ” said Stevie Walker-Webb, director of “trinity” and the artistic director of Baltimore Center Stage. “It’s like if Jean Paul Sartre and Adrienne Kennedy had a baby. If ‘Along Came Polly’ went out on a date with ‘Love Jones.’ It’s like German absurdism and French existentialism, it’s definitely the coolest thing I’ve ever worked on,” gushed Walker-Webb.
Waithe, who produced “The Peculiar Patriot,” a one-woman show starring Liza Jessie Peterson about two friends talking about life and their old neighborhood when one visits the other in jail, wanted to come to Baltimore to work with Walker-Webb.
“The truth is Stevie is the person I wanted to collaborate with. This is the place where he is leading,” Waithe said. “These walls, these theaters, these spaces feel like home, and I want you to feel that you are in your own living room.”
With a sparse set, “trinity” doesn’t exactly feel like a living room. In fact, a screen at the back of the stage uses text to indicate the setting in this experimental drama, with a sparse cast of only three — A, played by Waithe, B, played by television and theater veteran Courtney Sauls, and C, played by Fedna Jacquet, who worked with Walker-Webb in “Ain’t No Mo’” in 2022.
The play’s stark staging and unnamed characters are intended in some ways to free them — or force them? — to have the hard conversations and utter truths that would be horrifying if any of us laypeople said it.
Waithe wanted this particular story told on stage because she finds it is difficult to explore human truths in film and television — Black and other marginalized characters tend to have to contend with their Blackness or marginalization, not examine their relationships.
Waithe wanted this particular story told on stage because she finds it is difficult to explore human truths in film and television — Black and other marginalized characters tend to have to contend with their Blackness or marginalization, not examine their relationships.
“You can swap [the characters] out with three guys, two women and one guy, two guys and one woman, they could be white, they could be Black, they could be of any sexual orientation. I wanted to see each other’s humanity,” Waithe said.
When Waithe’s character, A, decides to write a play about the dissolution of her relationship with B, she blends flashbacks with present-day scenes, narrated with what each character really thinks and feels about each other.
With lights, sound effects, and accompanying video, “trinity” immerses the audience in a direct-to-camera style of storytelling. A screen in the back labels the different scenes, A and B’s bedroom, C’s apartment, and a baseball game, to focus on what the characters are saying to each other and leaving little room for inferences. It was humorous; we were looking at characters clearly in a bed, clearly romantically involved, but we still needed to be told where we were. The labels show us the relationship’s impermanence serves as a reminder that we should pay attention to what they are saying and not where they are.
In a woozy love triangle, A cheats on B, the sensible, long-suffering partner, with C, a mutual friend. But this relationship is colored by A’s mother, who appears as a silhouette on the screen. The relationships are dialectical. B is not just the passive scorned lover begging A to stay. A’s insecurity and desperate need for external love bolsters B’s desire to feel needed; her relationship’s adversity makes her stronger. C is not simply the hypotenuse of this love triangle; she takes A from B in revenge for stealing the lead in the dance performance. And A is not a careless lothario, she is filling the gaps of love her mother should have. C’s validation of her makes her feel special.
In the world of “trinity,” the ability to love is based on selfish motivations, satisfaction of our own empty spaces. The objects of our love see straight through our self-absorption and call us out.
Aided by the play’s sound effects and lighting, the characters work out the entangled relationships with bald conversations. For example, B confronts C about her jealousy. B asks C flat out, “were you jealous?” to which C answers, “of course not.” The lights flicker onstage and glitch statics through the air. The characters blink and B asks again, “were you jealous?” to which C replies, “of course I am.”
But sometimes the abstraction of the premise seems to fall flat. As in life, in other plays the subtext is often the most important thing. Not what they are saying, but what they are not saying. But Waithe strips that away, so we listen to A articulate that she is insecure because she was neglected by her mother for 75 minutes instead of seeing how those relationships might be connected. When we know exactly what the characters think, they also lose a certain depth that can come from shadows.
At the end, we are left wondering if the characters would take heed to hearing their flaws and innermost fears stated aloud. Are the characters cleansed enough of their pain for a reversal in their behavior and relationship choices? Will they confront themselves in hopes to transform?
One would hope that after all that emotional stripping the audience would see what the characters do with their truths. A would make peace with her relationship with her mother. We see B shed some of her strength and become vulnerable. C realizes that her jealousy blocks her from intimate relationships that could be good for her.
But instead, the characters simply end their relationships with each other. C’s final scene is in her apartment, when B visits to tell her that they must not continue their friendship. A and B return to the initial scene — in outer space, of all places — and B tells A that she is choosing herself, and she puts her space helmet back on and exits backstage. When A’s mother calls and she appears onstage, shedding her silhouette, she tells A that she is dying — derailing the next confrontation when A would tell her mother that she felt abandoned.
This radical alternative to lying or silence, blatant honesty, left us in the same place we were at the start. Characters don’t work through their internal insecurities, they simply eliminate the external manifestations, which leaves room for their replacements.