Marti Gobel Shines in a Reprise of RTW's "Neat"

Photo by Ross Zentner.

Renaissance Theaterworks already had their work cut out for them this year — long before the pandemic closed their doors. After decades of performing in the small and artisitcally challenging black box Studio Theatre at Broadway Theatre Center, the 28-year-old company had decided to move a few blocks out of the Third Ward to the Next Act space, so they could expand their audience size and the scale of their productions.

With the abrupt halt of their final play of the 2019-2020 season, while still in rehearsals last March, the company waited. They partnered with other theaters to host interactive “theater in a box” evenings and a virtual collection of three plays by BIPOC writers called Belonging. Now they are back with a refreshed production from their archives, Marti Gobel reprising her role in the much lauded one-person show, Neat, by Charlayne Woodard. Presented in the Next Act theater and expertly filmed, it is available on demand, streaming through April 11th.

Looking at the long list of her awards and acting credits on Broadway, television, and film, it is easy to imagine that Charlayne Woodard has led a charmed life. But her autobiographical triptych of one-woman plays tells a more complicated story. In the second in the series, Neat, Woodard focuses on her own awkward adolescence, her discovery of, and participation in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, and her changing relationship with her Aunt Beneatha, who everyone called “Neat”.

There are certainly parts of the coming-of-age play that lean towards sentimentality – picking out sweet, universal moments of simple pleasures, such as licking a dripping popsicle made from Kool-Aid in a Dixie cup on a hot summer day. But the script’s really impressive feat is presenting so many shocking, often horrendous things as normal parts of the narrator’s life. In Woodard’s narrative, institutional racism didn’t just send the police in riot gear to pummel high school students who had asked for books about the Black experience to be included in the library, and it didn’t just force Charlayne’s grandmother to sit in the back of the bus with her seizing infant, after Neat was accidently poisoned. The white supremacy that was baked in to every aspect of the family’s life is a foregone conclusion – one that must ultimately be endured by those who are wronged by it daily – even in an era calling for sweeping change.

Photo by Ross Zentner.

Woodard’s play does a spectacular job of painting vivid pictures of life in the rural South and the suburban North for Black families in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, picking out small but distinct, evocative details of the clothes, the food, the voices that filled the domestic scenes of her adolescence. And juxtaposing the narrator Charlayne — a smart, curious, self-conscious, and ever-chaning teen — with her brain damaged, child-like, unchanging Aunt Neat is a brilliant device.

But this script depends on a genius actress to bring dozens of characters to life with specific voices, ages, cadences, accents and gestures, and there is no one better at this kind of shapeshifting than Marti Gobel. As she proved in productions of No Child, produced by Theatre LILA and Next Act, Gobel literally contains multitudes of characters that can have fast paced and difficult conversations, making the audience forget that only one actor is present. In Neat, the 40-something actress not only nails the impatience, giddyness, and burgeoning individualism of a teen girl, Gobel also creates a mentally challenged adult who is as complex as any other character in the story. Throw in a fundamentalist preacher, a white cop, generations of family matriachs, a Black Panther, a too-cool teen boy angling for Charlayne’s affection, and dozens of other players and you have the world of Neat created by a single artist.

With dance and movement choreographed by Jayne Pink and direction by RTW Artistic Director Suzan Fete, the story is perfectly paced and painted lovingly as a remembrance of a far-away childhood, with echoes of racism that resonate too clearly today. Neat is a triumph, and an amazing way for RTW to begin a new era in a new home.