“Transfers”

Lucy Thurber

Who is let in the gate to reside inside the ivy-covered walls of Hared University?  Who is left only looking in from the outside?  What set of qualifications wins out in the end when two candidates – one African American, one Latino — have both beaten all odds over the daily hunger, hazards, and helplessness they each faced growing up in a neighborhood of the Bronx where drugs, knives, and bullets reigned supreme?  What boundaries must be faced and crossed – racial, ethnic, economic, class, sexual orientation – by both the scholarship applicants and the evaluators; and which, if any, will be a source of special consideration? 

Many questions of who is naturally given and who can earn (and why) the special privilege of higher education are raised in Lucy Thurber’s Transfers, an often tense, always engaging play that had its extended-run world premiere in 2018 at Off-Broadway’s Lucille Lortel Theatre.  Now in a gripping, exceptionally acted West Coast premiere by Crowded Fire Theater, laugh-out-loud humor, posture-alerting drama, and tear-invoking moments intertwine throughout to produce a politically charged play timely and thought-provoking. 

David (David Everett Moore) is visibly upset and can only talk in stumbled phrases as he deals both with a girlfriend on the phone who gives him little time to respond to her obvious anger and as he tries to figure out how to handle the fact a motel in this snowy, cold, Western Pennsylvania college town has messed up his reservation.  How will he be able to coach properly two young men arriving any minute from New York to ready them for their all-important interview tomorrow that will determine if they get one of two full scholarships to the hallowed, private university?  Two boys are coming from the Bronx to a community as foreign to them as probably anywhere on earth who now must stay in the same small room overnight, and listen to each other while he tries to prepare both for their shot to escape from a neighborhood where most of their peers are stuck with limited-to-no opportunities beyond the nefarious occupations of the streets.

When each arrives, they could hardly be more different although they both come from the same community college and each actually grew up within blocks of each other.  Clarence Matthews (Victor D. Ragsdale) is quiet, respectful, and fully prepared for his interview, having studied about this area’s history of “the Puritans, the Catholics, and the cold.”  He has even read and become enthralled with New England’s Edith Wharton and her 1911 novel, Ethan Frome, set in a community not unlike the one where he now wants so badly to go to school to become a writer.  While he is an African American about to interview to study at a setting probably as white as the snow outside, he is clearly already at home in many ways.

On the other hand, Christofer Rodriguez (Caleb Cabrera) bursts into the sparse room with all the fury of the winter winds outside, immediately recognizing Clarence and being quick to tell David that he has no intention sleeping in the same room with someone who “likes sucking dicks.”  Christofer is abrupt, loud, and full of the kind of sure-hearted cockiness that helped him become the state’s Number Two wrestling star.  He already knows the university’s coach wants him badly, and he just wants to get all this over so he can grab the full scholarship he so believes he deserves.

There is an unknown but obvious history between the two boys that goes beyond but is certainly connected somehow to Christofer’s crass description of Clarence.  While David is upset and appalled (and clearly is already fighting a quickly concluded bias against Christofer’s candidacy), Clarence takes it in laughing stride and admits wholeheartedly that Christofer’s description is exactly what he likes to do. 

As the evening progresses and stories start to unfold as conversations settle down to topics more meaningful, the two boys connect in ways surprising to each, as assumptions each had of the other coming from their shared history begin to erode.  In particular, Christofer’s grandmother – a woman who raised him and who died two years prior – and a handsome gang leader of their shared neighborhood, Renaldo, become important touchstones in their building at first a tentative, and then a much stronger bridge between them.

With a continued awkward manner as he tries to suggest coaching tips for the boys’ interviews, David treads into territories tender, especially for Christofer whom David believes must come up with a good story why his resume shows two years of nothing.  Mr. Moore’s David is a man with his own back-stories, issues, and hang-ups that perhaps could be their own play; and often the explosiveness, shaking hands, and trembling voice employed by the actor is close to being to being its own show.  Lucy Thurber has created a character who clearly wants to save the world by helping boys like these two get a fair shake, but she has laden him and us with hints of too many other aspects without having the time and plot line to let those fully develop.

When the morning arrives, the play shifts to the offices of the interviewers of each boy; and again, the contrasts could hardly be greater between the two and their experiences.  Michael Wayne Rice is Clarence’s professorial interviewer, Geoffrey Dean; and the two amazingly fast-connect in a number of spoken and implied ways.  Both are for sure of the same race and maybe — as deemed through looks and double-meaning words — of the same sexual orientation.  When Clarence shares, “In a way, I am always invisible,” Geoffrey replies, “I think we share … an intense, emotional life.”  Each also brings a love and passion for reading, leading them to a back-and-forth exchange about favorite writers, with Clarence beamingly admitting, “I want to give my life to words.”  The ongoing exchange amidst an office with shelves of books and large hanging banners of the university floating overhead is indeed engaging and exciting, even for us as an observing audience.

On the other hand, when Christofer walks in to find his interviewer is a woman coach (his already mentioned worst nightmare), there is an immediate battle of words and wills. As rugby coach Rosie McNulty, Alison Whismore is firm, fierce, and feisty as she quickly goes after Christofer with questions peppered with an aggressiveness she must also use on the athletic field.  But this battle starts shifting as each gives no ground, and back-and-forth questions from each begin to reveal parallels in their lives that match time and again, tit for tat, no matter how personal the areas of questioning become.  Ms. McNulty is brilliant in the role of Rosy while Caleb Cabrera only solidifies his place as the evening’s most stunning performance among a cast of fine actors all.

When David and the two interviewers come together for selection of the two scholarships (with there having been other interviewed candidates we do not meet), the script once again takes some ventures down side streets as we learn there is varying histories long and involved as well as current feelings varied and deeply held among the three.  But when those history hints are dispensed, the discussion of who is to be rewarded and why provides the playwright’s capstone that ensures any audience member watching is going to feel compelled to question and discuss the result upon leaving. 

Ken Savage directs this fine cast through an hour, forty-minute series of four scenes (with no intermission) that literally fly by in what seems a much shorter time.  The intensity of each scene – all somehow still broken up with welcomed moments of humor – draws us in as an audience where it is almost impossible not to lean in as if an active participant in the intimate setting of the small Potrero Stage.  Kate Boyd has created a setting where a motel’s lone bed that later opens to become an office’s book shelves is beautifully, mysteriously lying in front of a back wall with many rows and columns of white papers — all in various shapes of fold – and all blank, just waiting for a future student to fill them with words.  Chris Lundahl’s lighting makes each sheet pop to life as well as produce shadows on a motel’s walls and floor that give it further definition beyond the one lone bed.  Jackquelin Pedota’s costumes tell us volumes about each of these five, very different personalities.

Lucy Thurber’s play about a privileged university’s outreach to students of lesser privilege than the moneyed set who most probably populate its classrooms is far from being a lecture or a cheat sheet full of answers.  When her play keeps the focus on these two young men whose stories, character traits, and motivations are overall so well developed in the course of one evening and one interview, Crowded Fire’s Transfers is a rich trove of raised questions that provides its audience ample stimulation for follow-up study and reflection. 

Rating: 4.5 E

Transfers continues through March 23, 2019 in production by Crowded Fire Theater at Potrero Stage, 1695 Eighteenth Street, San Francisco.  Tickets are available http://www.crowdedfire.org.