Paris is Burning

When Lenelle Moïse and Karla Mosley stepped on stage and started singing, I wasn’t sure I liked what I had gotten into as the overly dramatic, black diva act filled the small venue. 

“Please, please,” I told myself, “don’t let this be one of those over-the-top, ‘look at me roar’ plays.” 

The gods of theater heard me and instead of a lounge-like musical, Expatriate turned out to be a well-composed reflection of two best friends who grew up in the Boston projects, experienced some serious ups and downs and eventually moved to Paris finding solace through music.  Written and composed by Moïse, Expatriate painted a realistic view of growing up with emotional hardship.

Claudie, a statuesque Moïse, and Alphine, a sexy Mosley, were portrayed in adolescence while scenarios of their time in Paris were interweaved into the dialoge.  Slowly the audience learns that Alphine’s parents are dead, she has been in and out of abusive foster homes, and is in a tumultuous relationship with Claudie’s twin brother Omar.  Claudie’s childhood involved taking care of her drug-addicted mother who died right before she went into ninth grade.  Following the death, her grandmother took care of her until Claudie moved to New York and successfully completed her education at Julliard.  Alphine followed her and honed her musical skills singing in jazz clubs and going to Omar’s hip-hop concerts.

While the sultry, flirty Alphine drank and had numerous lovers, intellectual, obsessive-compulsive Claudie mothered Alphine and Omar while trying to make her own music.  When her brother died of an overdose just like their mother, Claudie left the grief-stricken Alphine to make a new life for herself in Paris.  

Because Moïse wrote the play, the smooth way her character worked with Mosley’s surprised me. The characters flowed together as if the actors composed it simultaneously.  Also, by standing in the shadows of the stage they convincingly acted out the few male parts in the play without it being distracting.  Both merits also attest that director Tamilla Woodard did her job.

Another thing that made the play successful was the mix of song with action. In Paris, Claudie, using a JamMan loop machine, sang and danced the letters she wrote to Alphine. Eventually Alphine shows up on the doorstep of Claudie’s lover’s house and, as anticipated, the lover is a woman. Alphine accepts Claudie’s sexuality and wearily, Claudie lets her stay. The women rekindle their friendship and the band Black Venus is born. 

So here we have two beautiful and successful black women in Paris. Though, as any great story goes, one travels down the bad path while the other remains righteous and true to her art.  What impressed me about the situations the play presented was their authenticity.  They could have happened.  Parts of this story did happen to singers like Josephine Baker and Nina Simone, which Moïse intended.  While at about two hours the play ran a little long, the only parts I really didn’t get into occurred the couple times Black Venus performed.  The other songs I found beautiful and meaningful, especially the last one, “Rebel,” where Claudie sings, “What good is a rebel if the rebel turns up dead?”  This is Claudie’s (and Moïse’s) statement about beautiful and talented people who kill themselves with drugs, which sums up the message of the play.

Through August 3. The Culture Project, 55 Mercer Street (betw. Broome & Grand Sts.), 212-352-3101; Mon. 7; Wed.-Fri. 8; Sat. 5 and 9; Sun. 7, $41.