In this powerful reimagining of Amiri Baraka’s Obie-winning 1964 play, successful-but-troubled man about town Clay (Festival tributee André Holland) has an important evening ahead—a party launching the political campaign of his friend Warren (Aldis Hodge)—when he meets a tempestuous woman named Lula (Kate Mara) on the subway. Both Clay and Lula have demons—he’s in marriage therapy and she’s a racial provocateur who threatens to upend his life. Baraka’s seminal and disturbing work addresses racial and sexual polarities between Black men and white women and Gaines’s update suggests that society—and Black men in particular—needs to push past and through the play’s dynamics in order to heal. Stephen McKinley Henderson as therapist Dr. Amiri (note the name!) and Atlanta’s Zazie Beets as Clay’s wife Kaya are memorable in supporting roles, but it’s Mara and Holland who faceoff fearlessly and unforgettably in Gaines’s coruscating film.
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