Stick Fly

Cort Theatre

New York

(212) 239-6200

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This is far from Broadway’s first family drama full of “simmering conflict, steamy romance, and gasp-worthy revelations,” said Charles Isherwood in The New York Times. What sets Lydia R. Diamond’s new work apart is that the family is wealthy, aristocratic, and African-American. Thus, when the two sons of a neurosurgeon head home to Martha’s Vineyard and bring their girlfriends, one a privileged white do-gooder and the other a black woman of more modest background, “pointed discussions of race and class erupt as often as testy personality clashes.” Unfortunately, these themes are “spelled out in block letters” in the dialogue, which ranges from “pointed and funny” to “sitcommy and slack.”

Though Stick Fly is a bit of a mess, it’s “a fascinating one,” said Terry Teachout in The Wall Street Journal. Because “one of the most exciting things that a playwright can do is show you an unfamiliar way of life,” Diamond “can be forgiven any number of theatrical sins.” Yes, the playwright’s “wholly original subject matter is at war with her been-there-done-that plot,” and the ending is also a little too neat. Yet the play is never dull, mostly because the cast “breathes life into even the most predictable scenes.”

The one true standout isn’t whom you’d expect, said Scott Brown in New York. Many of the performers are very good: Ruben Santiago-Hudson as the patriarch, Mekhi Phifer and Dulé Hill as the sons, and Rosie Benton and Tracie Thoms as their significant others. But the play’s best moment belongs to young Condola Rashad, who plays Cheryl, the teenage daughter of the family’s longtime maid, now filling in for her cancer-stricken mother. Cheryl regularly cleans up after the bickering LeVay family until she can take no more, and then calls them out on their snobby, solipsistic bantering in an electrifying rant. For all the surrounding drama, “only Rashad’s Cheryl really has the power to burn through the badinage and into the audience’s soul.”