Crumbs from the Table of Joy

Crumbs from the Table of Joy

Lynn Nottage

Aurora Theatre Company

For seventeen-year-old Ernestine Crump on the verge of her high school gradation, life sometimes “feels like floating out of your body, entering the Milky Way and getting stuck in it just as its curdling.”  That is especially true for this young Black girl living in lily-white Brooklyn in 1950.  After all, her father Godfrey moved the family north from Florida to be near his new spiritual idol, Father Divine, only to discover he does not actually live there; her long-lost, Communist-leaning, wild-and-wooly Aunt Lily has moved in with them; and her younger sister Ermina beats up girls that laugh at her Southern-born ways.  And then there is Gerte, a white, German lady who is suddenly her new step-mom.  As Langston Hughes suggests in his poem “Luck,” “Sometimes a crumb falls from the tables of joy; sometimes a bone is flung.”

In the intimate setting of Aurora Theatre Company, the sometimes hilarious, often gripping, and always heart-warming Crumbs from the Table of Joy by Lynn Nottage is graced by a spot-on cast whose excellence is inspired by both a poetically rich script and the ingenuous creativity and emotional depth of Elizabeth Carter’s direction.  This teenager’s coming-of-age story is rich with a period’s history that often feels current in nature — a time when being a woman, a Black, a person advocating for the down-and-out, or a recent immigrant could mean limited opportunities and plenty of hate-filled prejudice, whether in Jim Crow South or in the New York North.

Stepping in as the understudy for the role usually played by Anna Marie Sharpe, Courtney Williams as Ernestine brings just the right mixture of the imagination-rich, dreamy-eyed girl she is about to leave behind and the steady-eyed, self-determined adult she will soon become.  Her Ernestine serves as our ongoing narrator, often speaking directly to us in a reporter’s steady voice to provide background information or — with a smirky grin — to erase and replay an outlandish scene we just watched, saying, “At least I wish that had happened.”  Like many teenagers, Ernestine is a big movie buff, often informing us how a scene in her life would/could be played out on the big screen, especially if she were the star.  But she is all too aware what it actually takes to succeed in her 1950’s world.  “Don’t you worry, when I get on the screen, I can be quite white.”

That is until she begins to learn there are alternative ways to navigate the white world around her.  After all, when Aunt Lily suddenly arrives on the doorstep to stay (“Kinda like buying flowers without having to plant the seeds”), Ernestine is in awe.  “She is the first colored woman I’d seen dressed like a white lady.”  From her politically active Aunt who also knows how to have a good time in dance halls all night, she hears revolutionary ideas like “Don’t none of them crackers don’t want to share any of their power with us” and “nobody wants to hire a smart colored woman … I’m not going to be anybody’s maid.”  

Asia Nicole Jackson absolutely is a knock-out in the role of the snazzy, sassy, and purposefully sexy Aunt Lily who has not a problem being provocative, irreverent, and a bit trouble-making — especially when around her former-partying, now-pure-and-righteous brother-in-law, Godfrey.  Lily snaps out lines by the dozens that cause Godfrey to frown, Ermina to giggle, and Ernestine to observe wide-eyed and then contemplate with serious intent.  When asked why she doesn’t have a job, she remarks, “A Negro woman with my gumption don’t keep work so easily .. one of the hazards of being an independent thinker.”  For Ernestine, Aunt Lily is like a walking/talking, missing book she cannot find in the library among those on the American and French Revolutions to tell her all about the “Negro Revolution.”

Lily is a challenge for one of Father Divine’s most faithful, Godfrey, whose thirty-second slides down temptation’s road as lured by Lily’s swerving hips and puckered lips are only temporary.  Otherwise, David Everett Moore’s Godfrey is mostly a frown-prone, serious-minded, hardworking baker who wants his girls to wear the”V” on their dresses (“Virtue, Victory Virginity”) and to love like he the godlike Divine, for whom he constantly makes notes of the many questions he wants someday to ask him.  Moore is outstanding as the oft-weepy widower whose silent, empty stares into nowhere speak volumes of the pain and isolation he feels as a Black man shouldered with raising young girls in a world of “them whites.”

Carrie Paff is fabulously flush in positive and optimistic spirit and smiles as the sudden surprise who walks in the door — the white German and now wife of Godfrey, Gerte Shulte.  How that happens and what effects she has on him, on the girls, and even on Lily is a brilliant twist to Nottage’s story.  Her entrance eventually also provides a further, harsh glimpse of the prejudices and everyday risks that millions of Blacks faced in the Great Migration from South to North during and post WWII.

Not to be overlooked as maybe the most delightfully devilish and delicious character of the entire production is Jamella Cross as fifteen-year-old Ermina.  It is with great risk as an audience member to turn one’s eyes from her even for a minute since at any given moment, Ermina constantly may react with a face capable of a hundred, unique expressions — each worthy of a photographer’s lens to capture for posterity.  Her pouts, her sudden collapses on an awaiting bench, her eyes that pop almost out of her head, her snickers that sound off when they shouldn’t — all and more are the makings of a teenage girl who is full of spunk and spark, fully ready to stomp off in rebellion or as ready to run with open arms and be the first to forgive.

The bare, brick walls of a basement apartment whose windows jut up against more bricked barriers covered in faded-paint are the simple but telling setting created by Randy Wong-Westbrooke.  The scene is embellished by the sounds of neighbors’ TVs and nearby crowded streets as well as by the atmosphere-setting bebop tunes of the times, all part of the sound scape created so magnificently by Ray Archie.  Becky Bodurtha’s costumes paint a picture of the early ’50s, from the humble wear of the Crumps to the brightly-hued, Harlem styles of Lily.  

Lynn Nottage provides much seed for rich harvests through a script that is ripe in phrases that paint in a few words the many hopes, challenges, conflicts, and victories of a family facing the post-war pushes and pulls of race, sex, and political possibilities and prejudice.  Within that arena, a teenage girl is about to graduate into a life that she is quickly realizing will not be like the movies she so adores but will none the less be meaningful and exciting, given the tutoring she has received by her family.  And as she graduates, we in the audience of Aurora Theatre Company’s Crumbs from the Table of Joy exit all the richer and perhaps with new insights how to navigate our own world of 2025.

Rating: 5 E

A Theatre Eddys Best Bet Production

Crumbs from the Table of Joy conntinues through May 25, 2025, in a two-hour, fifteen minute (one intermission) production by Aurora Theatre Company, 2081 Addison Street, Berkeley, California.  Tickets are available at www.auroratheatre.org or through the box office at 510-843-4822.

Photo Credits: Kevin Berne