Like Ms. Bernstine, these actresses shift between 19th- and 21st-century attire to enact scenes that echo one another across history. (Kaye Voyce did the quick-change costumes, and Mariana Sanchez’s set morphs from what appears to be a modern, pink-walled hospital into the Jamaica of Seacole’s childhood and, hilariously gruesome, a bloody Crimean battlefield.)
Some of these vignettes emphasize the abiding gap between white women and the black women they employ, exploit and dismiss. Others stress the shared status of women as they relate, with ambivalence, to their friends and family members of the same gender.
Individually, there’s nothing strikingly original in most of these scenes. A stressed, young white mother patronizingly tries to connect with black child-minders in a park; a mother and her teenage daughter bicker over the care of the older woman’s infirm mother, revealing the narcissism of each.
Seen collectively, though, they become a dazzling hall of mirrors. World history starts to feel like one big funhouse in which the same games, distortions and deceptions — including, and especially, self-deceptions — are practiced again and again. And contrary to what self-help books like to tell us, no one is ultimately in charge of their own narrative.
That includes even the formidable Seacole, despite her undeniable achievements and her matching skills as a fabulist. At one point, she suddenly finds herself lip-syncing to a recording of the pop classic “I’m Every Woman.”
As pricelessly rendered by Ms. Bernstine, our redoubtable heroine doesn’t look altogether comfortable with these lyrics that have been thrust upon her. But what choice does she have?
In the unsettled landscape of “Marys Seacole,” individual ego doesn’t stand a chance against the crushing flux of history. And Ms. Drury gloriously confirms her status as a playwright for whom the long view is disturbingly, divertingly and endlessly kaleidoscopic.
