The Guest at Central Park West

Written by Levy Lee Simon

Directed by Thomas Cote

The WorkShop Theater Company

312 West 36th Street, 4th Floor

 

Review by Julie Colthorpe

 

Cruising on the wave of success, life should be a breeze right now for African American Professor Charles Watts (Harvy Blanks), who has just won the Nobel Prize for his pacifist book “The Eyes of Peace.” Instead, he is fearful for his life. Plagued with death threats, he no longer feels safe in his own home. Nevertheless, Charles and his wife Nina (Trish McCall) decide to hold an intimate dinner party in honor of his award, a dinner party that will ultimately change the lives of the guests forever.

 

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Tempers flare between old friends in Levy Lee Simon’s The Guest at Central Park West.

 

The Guest at Central Park West is a high-tension drama that slowly unravels itself like a tightly wound ball of string. The guests are white Professor Eric Engles (Jed Dickenson) and his wife Jennifer (Tracy Newirth), whose marital discord rears its ugly head within the first five minutes of their arrival. Their vitriolic feuds are reminiscent of those of Martha and George in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and the evening soon turns into a battlefield of opposing political views.

 

The evening is severely thrown off-kilter when an unwanted guest turns up. The guest turns out to be Terrence Barlow (John Marshall Jones), a homeless vagrant, who is also an old Harvard friend of Charles’. Bad times have fallen on Terrence, who cuts a frightening figure as his checkered and dangerous past is unveiled. A former gun runner, crack dealer and ex-con, Terrence is now a boiling pot of rage. The evening hits a nail-biting climax when Nina’s bi-racial daughter Lisa (Erin Holmes) and her white, dreadlocked, rapper boyfriend, Seth (Curt Bouril) arrive. Terrence holds them all hostage and skeletons start flying out of Charles’ long-locked-up closet as his deepest and darkest secrets are revealed.

 

With superb performances and strong direction, The Guest at Central Park West is a play that pushes all the right buttons with powerful political and social messages concerning the U.S. and its impact on the rest of the world. We are given serious food for thought when Terrence comments on his fate, “This could happen to anyone ... Most Americans are just two paychecks away from homelessness.” For the richest country in the world, this is definitely a disconcerting thought.