The Best of Enemies is a tragedy mash up
You would think that being a poor white-trash racist would be enough for one person to bear. When you are working with a character that is a KKK leader, attempted murderer, and lover of hate, that is quite a lot. Especially when you are tackling the topics of race, segregation, and civil rights. These black and white issues don’t need to much to make them grey. But apparently, in Mark St. Germain’s The Best of Enemies, there just can’t be enough tragedy and shit happening to make two different sides come together and hug.
I had mixed feelings going into The Best of Enemies at Theatrical Outfit. On one side I was hopeful to see an honest and raw portrayal of a time that I luckily did not live through, but still has lingerings of similar issues today. But on the other hand, I was cynical about walking into a production that was all change is easy and good, let’s be besties and forget that we hate one another.
The Best of Enemies had a good thing going. The language was intense. There is no better feeling in art than feeling squirmy because of the honesty. The Best of Enemies had this. It was hard to hear and watch at times as both sides create reasons to continue with their current path towards destruction and violence, but it was reality. It wasn’t romanticized or one sided. It had a really good path laid down. But then things started to happen that took away from the story at hand.
If you can’t find a reason for two sides of this race war to come together in some way other than personal tragedy then you probably should write about another topic. You aren’t ready for this yet. As mentioned before, C.P. Ellis (Bruce Evers) is a low class racist. He is going through a lot already. But then we find out that he also has a severely mentally disabled son. Which I think if we stuck to this side story line and didn’t take his personal tragedy any further this could have totally worked as a factor of connection between Ellis and his black adversary, Ann Atwater (Elisabeth Omilami). There is even a line spoken from Ellis’s wife, Mary Ellis (Lala Cochran), about how awful it is that differences keep us apart. This could have been an amazing correlation between the way that Ellis treats his son and how he treats blacks. The realities of this discrimination could have been compact and important for a moment in theatre. But no, we had to make sure that Ellis truly suffered for zero reason.
So like I said, he’s already a racist, has a disabled son, is not a nice man, and, wait for it, now his wife has cancer. Ellis treats everyone like shit, even his wife. But now she has cancer and he kind of seems to care. And then she dies. And then he tries to kill himself. At this point in the show I laughed to myself and a little bit out loud because of how ridiculous it all was. I could have gotten on board with the disabled son and the parallels. But cancer, a dead wife, and then a suicide attempt are taking it way too far. This is lazy writing and story telling and a good editor would have said please stop and realize why you are writing this story. If you want a cancer story, or a suicide story, then keep those ideas for another piece of work. Plus, why are we supposed to believe that this man that is so full of hatred and sourness would become an angel after being crapped on by the world. He would have become even more evil and gone on a killing spree most likely and he wouldn’t have killed himself.
If you want this KKK Cyclops to be tender then show this through the wife or since you felt the need to include a disabled son, do it that way. Have a reason for these arbitrary things. And limit them, Mark St. Germain.
The Best of Enemies is running till Feb. 23, and, oh yeah, I forgot Ellis also has a funeral at the end. So there’s a lot of useless death and hugs. Go for the challenge of understanding how this story went so wrong.
