Clyde's
Playwrights tend to show up in clusters around the San Diego theater scene. My first review was for Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band at La Jolla Playhouse in 2019. Yee’s Great Leap Forward showed up at Cygnet less than a year later. Keiko Green got Exotic Deadly at The Old Globe and Sharon at Cygnet. A.R. Gurney’s had a remarkable run of late, starting with Lamplighters’ The Cocktail Hour in early 2022, followed by The Dining Room at PowPAC, then Love Letters at La Jolla Playhouse, and then The Cocktail Hour again for Trinity Theater’s canny first production in their new home inside Mission Valley Center. (Canny because at one point, the playwright protagonist unleashes an impassioned lament that theater seems to be all he can do, despite its precarious status in the current entertainment landscape.) John Patrick Shanley got Italian-American Reconciliation at Scripps, Doubt at New Village Arts, and now Outside Mullingar at Lamb’s Players. Now it seems to be Lynn Nottage’s turn, starting with Intimate Apparel at North Coast Rep, moving on to Clyde’s at Moxie, and then going big for MJ: The Musical at the Civic Center. Sometimes, the clustering is beneficial: you get a sense of the playwright’s voice and vision across a range of dramatic settings. Other times, it’s more instructive: you get to see development — or its opposite. Intimate Apparel and Clyde’s work similar territory and themes: working-class blacks and the spiritual significance of their work. Intimate Apparel had lingerie fashioned by a woman starved for love; Clyde’s has sandwiches made by ex-cons, chief among them Montrellous, a kitchen Buddha who layers in more meaning than even the sturdiest sandwich can gracefully bear. Under him are sassy sister Letitia, fiery Latino Rafael, and angry newbie Jason. Over them all: Clyde, a tough gal who needs to please her crooked investors more than she needs to succeed as a legit business, and way more than she needs to nurture her fellow former jailbirds. The characters talk to each other — oh, do they talk, sometimes when there are sandwiches to be made! — but too often, it feels like they’re talking past each other, and to the audience. Everybody’s got a story, but they come at the expense of the story at hand. And while the regular pauses for descriptions of fantasy sandwiches are delightful, they don’t feel real — these are desperate souls working a last-chance greasy spoon, not artists in exile. The ending is equally baffling: why throw a tantrum when you could just serve relish on the side?
When
Ongoing until Sunday, March 10, 2024
Hours
| Sundays, 2pm-4pm |
| Thursdays, 7:30pm-9:30pm |
| Fridays, 8pm-10pm |
| Saturdays, 8am-10am |