Naima Khan reviews the powerfully provocative Sunset Baby but finds it doesn't quite deliver the long-range socio-political punch it promises.
Named for Nina Simone, the Nina in Sunset Baby is the adult daughter of two black civil rights revolutionists, Kenyatta Shakur and Ashanti X. With her legendary mother now dead after years of spiralling into drug addiction, her estranged father decides to make an appearance and ask for the letters Ashanti wrote to him while he was in prison. These unsent letters form the axis on which all deals are spun.
Be it money, history, affection or promises, the currencies at play here all cut deep and writer Dominique Morisseau gives her protagonist an exterior layer that prepares her for these injuries. But Nina is still shaken to her core by recent events and despite her smart but thuggish boyfriend, Damon (Chu Omambala), she really is all alone in the world.
When it comes to Damon, Morisseau makes the point that smart and thuggish aren't mutually exclusive but she does it quite bluntly by having him quote Steven Spitzer's ideas about Social Junk and Social Dynamite of which he and Nina are the latter: people who have fallen, or been pushed through the cracks but fight back. Only thing is, he pushes back by hustling which is of course part of a subtler system that people of Kenyatta's generation are forgiven for putting on the back burner while they fought for immediate rights. In this sense, Morisseau demonstrates eloquently the political gap between those generations. And in a familial sense she does the same thing when she has a guarded, hardened Nina tell her father “I am your legacy!”
It's not easy to watch and Michelle Asante gives a phenomenal performance as the heard-headed Nina, struggling to put her past in order, protect herself and somehow carve out a future. It's disappointing though, that after excellently establishing the interesting point that the monetary value of black history rests in the hands of the privileged academia (the only other people battling Nina for those letters), Morisseau gives Nina rather clichéd dreams of living it up in London or Paris (according to American pop culture, are these the only two places slick New Yorkers want to go?), although she makes a good point about how the generation that follows those activists thinks.
More disappointing is the treatment of Kenyatta. Though played with quiet dignity and a superb delicacy by Ben Onwukwe, Morisseau loses something by not giving Kenyatta anyone to talk to about himself apart from his daughter/self via camcorder. Without giving him a chance to really debate his position in his daughter's history (and American history) with someone outside their twisted game of leverage, it's easy for him to romanticise himself and that's kind of boring to watch. Unless maybe you're a father yourself.
So while tales of babies wetting themselves and taking photographs at sunset is moving enough, the rest of Morisseau's great script makes me want more. What practical effect did Kenyatta really have on his generation? How many others suffered the same self-destructive reaction to their struggle as his wife? What emotional effect did he have beyond his family? Was his family an inevitable sacrifice? Was it worth it? Can we/should we ever measure things in those terms?
Sunset Baby provokes all these questions but doesn't present us with enough arguments to keep the debate going for long. It is a powerfully provocative piece of theatre and you'll be more than aware of this as you're watching it, but it fails to fuel much discussion afterwards. 
Sunset Baby runs at Gate Theatre until 20th October
Image: Ben Onwukwe by Johan Persson 
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