Etta and Ella on the Upper West Side at REDCAT

Hybrid production takes theater in new direction

Known for its innovative visual, performing and media arts, it’s only fitting that REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) and CalArts Center for New Performance in February co-presented Etta and Ella on the Upper West Side. Written by award-winning playwright, lecturer and author Adrienne Kennedy (91), the play and this production challenged conventional expectations of theater. 

Adrienne Kennedy is one of the American theater’s seminal writers. Funnyhouse of a Negro, which premiered in 1964 and won an Obie Award is still her best known and most frequently mounted play. Kennedy utilizes symbolism and dreamlike conditions to convey messages about racism, sexism, colonialism and other destructive forces. Her stories also incorporate her own personal history and feature Black women as protagonists.

Kennedy has authored about two dozen plays in her six decade career. According to New York Theater critic Jonathan Mandell, in referencing a series of her plays put on in the 2022 New York Theater Festival, they are more frequently studied than produced, as Kennedy herself has complained. Kennedy’s work is admired but many of her plays are difficult for directors to stage — and for audiences to absorb. Her work has been called dark, difficult and abstract. However, at the age of 91, Kennedy made her Broadway debut in December with her play, Ohio State Murders (1992).

In this production, Etta and Ella Harrison are talented academics on the Upper West Side — as well as sisters and rivals. After a lifetime of competition, they are on the verge of destroying each other.

This story has been called baffling. It raises questions that could have varied, ambiguous answers – if at all. In fact, the script reads like a narration which was, at first, puzzling until it became clear this is how the production is staged, with the characters narrating as well as acting. However, amidst the raw emotion and psychological aspects at this story’s core between sisters — Etta, intense and vulnerable and Ella, smooth and confident — and director Monty Cole’s merging of theater and film, a lucid struggle between freedom and madness emerges.  

In honor of Kennedy’s rhythmic language and calling back to the original movie houses, the play opens with live pianist Maleke Clemmons who plays a beautiful, melancholic solo. Clemmons  later, also commands attention with his velvety baritone when he sings an old spiritual song. 

Etta calls Harold Troupe. She leaves a message on his machine.

 “I want to talk to you about a coming murder Harold,” said Etta.

Troupe is a writer and professor at City College. His books are on Black music and he’s compiling an anthology on Negro Spirituals. Etta lives across 89th Street in a brownstone in a room Troupe can see from his office. Sometimes Etta leaves five messages a night on Troupe’s machine.

While this is happening, sister Ella moves about the stage providing narration — along with some background; Troupe’s stature [handsome, melancholy] and his taste for bacon cheeseburgers. About Etta and her voice message on Troup’s machine, Ella satirizes her sister.

“Not only did she teach and write, she sometimes acted in her own plays. Her desperate voice is dramatic.”

Through Troupe’s narrative we discover Etta is angry that Ella has written a story about her sister’s devastating years in college, garnering much attention and even selling it to television. Yet, the press barely noticed Etta’s version of her own life story. Troupe has respect for Etta but he had forgotten about the sisters in recent years, who weren’t prominent anymore in his circle.

He recalled seeing Etta, who was once beautiful, on Broadway at the bookstore. She looked hopeless and her dress was careless. A huge contrast from the dazzling suits she and her sister used to wear.

He had been surprised to discover Etta was a member of the Vanishing Literary Club. Troupe recalls how the successful sisters had written together and over time, it became impossible to distinguish their experiences, thus creating their turmoil. The sisters write from experiences in their own lives — and accuse the other of plagiarizing from each other. They use the same character names and they even fight over the same name, Suzanne, for their characters. They had both planned to write separate books about their brother and each had the idea of holding imaginary conversations with him. 

Both wear their hair in an “upswept style” and they even wear the same costume, a floral black and white smock and white sneakers. Later, the sisters make one costume change, into identical black evening dresses.  

Taking this all in, curiosity overwhelms you. Is Etta haunted by her sister, this apparition? Was she murdered? Does Ella exist or was she created in Etta’s mind? Is she part of Etta’s psyche or a character in a story of hers? 

Early in the play, you’re still not certain about any of this. These queries usher you deeper into the events that have formed Etta’s precarious subconscious. A rabbit hole that becomes the hook, leaving you determined to discover, if not answers, then perhaps an understanding. 

I mention this to note the novelty at the core of Kennedy’s dreamlike, intense play and Cole’s harnessing that juxtaposition into this hybrid stage/film noir production. Cole’s cinematic approach provides an intricate blend of monologue, dialogue, voiceover and prose in a work that is part experimental play, part narrative thriller.

Through his film noir, Cole has created another character by way of an on stage screen. Just like the movies, but the screen is cloaked in a sheer, pleated curtain adding to the dreamlike narrative where subtle emotions are perceptible. The actors (Tori Danner – Ella, Sarajean Francois – Etta and Wesley T. Jones – Troupe) perform narration on film that, at times, suddenly transform into real time action — on stage. 

To experience Cole’s effective use of dual mediums with seamless technicality and the actors’ fluidity between stage and screen  — highlighted via musical score/soundtrack— unleashes the imagination. Indeed, this experience embodies theater anew through intimate and multifaceted encounters.

Monty Cole is an award-winning theater and film writer-director based in Chicago, Illinois. 

He has directed for The Goodman Theatre, Steppenwolf, Center Theatre Group, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, CalArts Center for New Performance, Alley Theatre, American Blues Theater, and many others. He is an Artist in Residence at CalArts Center for New Performance, a fellow at Hermitage Artist Retreat and a Research Scholar of the Bridge to Faculty at UIC. 

“Adrienne Kennedy is a masterful writer who creates beautiful puzzles, mysteries, nightmares, personal exorcisms that exist within their own understanding of time,” said Cole in the program notes. “For this world premiere production of Etta and Ella on the Upper West Side, the creative team was interested in how we could build an experience that honored Adrienne Kennedy’s unique storytelling in a way that hasn’t been done before.”

Adrienne Kennedy is the recipient of an Obie Award for Sleep Deprivation Chamber, which she co-authored with her son Adam. Other awards include a Guggenheim Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, the 1990 American Book Award, and induction into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2018, for Lifetime Achievement in the American Theater.

Details: centerfornewperformance.org  and redcat.org/events/2023/etta-and-ella