Clyde’s, that wild masterpiece garnering nightly standing ovations at the Goodman Theatre, is one of those stories you didn’t know you were waiting a life time to see until you do. Even when it’s over, you don’t quite know how to describe what you experienced. Too funny to be considered straight drama and grounded in a subject matter that’s completely chuckle free, Clyde’s lives in its own dimension. One that encourages you to hold on to a little hope despite the despair and difficult challenges that seep into everyday life.
As a truck stop sandwich shop, Clyde’s the diner dispenses with pretense and keeps it real simple. A greasy spoon that caters to truckers and maybe the mob, it blends into the background like a fire hydrant or traffic sign. Named after its owner who handles the front of the house, our impressions of the place builds, or is confirmed, slowly as this fast moving tale about a sandwich shop, its owner and its kitchen crew evolves. Clyde‘s may be a dump, but not everybody is content in leaving it that way.
One of those forces of nature who leave you breathless and makes your cringe, owner Clyde defies both comprehension and description. This Clyde (Danielle Davis) is female and an ex-con. Equipped with a slashing dagger for a tongue, she relishes drawing blood and does so frequently with clear sadistic glee. The sandwich shop’s kitchen staff make up her favorite prey. With a worldview and a personality that makes Scarface look life Shirley Temple, Clyde’s interest in taking the shop anywhere beyond where it already is can be measured in the negatives.
Head to the kitchen to find the dreamers. You know you’re dealing with a top-tier talent when every character in a production reads as excruciatingly real. With the incredible distinction of once having had three of her plays running at the same time on Broadway, playwright Lynn Nottage is one such phenomenon. The more she reveals the inner lives of Montrellus, Rafael, Jason and Letita, the more you become enamored of her gift to create with such resounding authenticity.
Montrellus (Kevin Kenerly) kindled his own dreams by finding a way to shut out the negative and channeling all his energies into what he did for a living, making sandwiches. It got him to a point where he was thinking way beyond tuna on rye. He not only dreamed of sandwiches that featured ingredients like curried quail eggs, he made them. And he’d always encourage the irascible Clyde to try them with the hope she’d add them to the menu. Watching Clyde resist, time after time, the temptation to taste one of his culinary epiphanies soon became hilarious. But the rest of the kitchen crew was paying attention. One by one they began letting themselves dream, too; conjuring up in their minds what made up the perfect sandwich and preparing all kinds of fanciful creations. None, no, most of them never rose to the ethereal perfection as Montrellus’s. But they all acted as magic carpets capable of carrying these dreamers to lives better than the ones they were living.
Their real lives are the kinds most people prefer to look away from; lives sabotaged by mistakes that land people in prison and leaves them stamped with the scarlet letter F, for felon, once they land back on the street. Letitia (Nedra Snipes), who goes by Tish, stole meds for her young daughter, got a little greedy, swiped some oxi along with her child’s medications and got busted. She and the rest of dreamers in the kitchen are all just like Clyde. Ex-cons. Light on options, they were stuck and, when it came to Clyde’s endless barrage of verbal abuse and thinly veiled threats, all but helpless.
With Montrellus as their guiding light, it’s the rapport and camaraderie they nurture between themselves in the kitchen, out of Clyde’s sight, that fills the play with wonder at the human spirit. Nottage considers herself an optimist and it’s that ability to see positive possibilities that shapes Clyde’s soul. When Rafael (Reza Salazar) starts hitting on Tish, initially we don’t take it very seriously. She doesn’t either. Loud, funny and laser focused on caring for her special needs three-year-old, there’s really nothing not to like about Tish. Except, as Rafael suspects, her willingness to settle for less from the men in her life. These are people who have an instinctual knowledge of how beautiful life can be while never losing sight at how mean the world is.
The last to make up the kitchen quartet, Jason (Garrett Young) is a little slow in allowing that “beautiful, generous energy” radiating from Montrellus to infect his core. At first insulated and distant, once he disgorges his demons, he becomes one of the most reliable well springs of humor on stage. His sketchy knowledge of the basic rules of hygiene garnered a lot of laughs the moment he donned his apron. But as his character sank into his community of acceptance, his idiosyncratic wit could be counted on for comedic relief in moments of tension and confrontation.
Written during the height of the pandemic to function as a psychological life raft to fatigued minds and spirits, Nottage intended Clyde’s to act as a salve. It also honors the person she modeled the play’s shaman, Montrellus, after. Beautifully directed by her longtime collaborator, Kate Whoriskey, Clyde’s succeeds in being just the kind of gift we all need in this prolonged season of uncertainty. Extended five nights, there’s still time to catch the wave.
Clyde’s
Through October 16, 2022
Goodman Theatre
170 North Dearborn
Chicago, IL 60601