By Olivia George
Is it possible for a person to live their life unaffected by race or gender? This is the question that playwright Christina Anderson sets out to answer in her one woman show, “Hollow Roots,” playing now at the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival.
Performed by April Matthis, Anderson’s words take on the feel of beat poetry, as we follow the story of a young, black woman who takes buses, trains, and puddle jumper planes all over New York, in her desperate attempt to discover a person with a neutral narrative; “a person of color, with no color.” Our narrator becomes obsessed with the idea, after a chance lunch she enjoys, during a break from her paralegal job, with five strangers at a family style restaurant, all of whom happen to be black. After the six reveal that they are each closet artists stuck in corporate jobs, one woman, who our narrator nicknames “the dreamer,” points out that the other common thread among their stories is that each of them was affected in some way by race.
Throughout the duration of the play, Matthis sits simply in the center of stage, wearing the bland button down garb of her profession. It isn’t a dramatic tableau, but her well-timed and passionate delivery of the speech coupled with Anderson’s lyrical and illustrative language provide for a highly engaging piece of theater. While Anderson’s metaphors often push the borders between what is intriguing and what is contrived, they never quite cross into the territory of the latter, and for the most part leave the audience with a new outlook. A particularly striking moment comes when Matthis describes the way she sorts documents, puts them in files, and puts the files in a cardboard box “that is not a racecar,” referencing an earlier monologue about how easy it was to be amazed by simple things as a child.
And of course, because this is the Public Theater, the audience is never allowed to sit idly by, but is submerged in the work entirely, and especially at the end when Matthis faces us almost accusingly to ask “Who do you think I could be?”
“Hollow Roots” will be playing at the Public Theater until the conclusion of the Under the Radar Festival on January 20.
Olivia George is Books & Theater Editor. Email her at ogeorge@nyunews.com
