'brownsville': Mourning dead young men of color

Even under the best circumstances, there's so much effort, so much heartbreak and anxiety that goes into raising, educating, and preparing a child for college and adulthood. Kimber Lee's brownsville song (b-side for tray), in a coproduction between Philadelphia Theatre Company and New Haven's Long Wharf Theatre, examines the tail end of those efforts when, despite all odds, everything starts to come together for Tray, a promising African American high school senior and aspiring boxer.

And then, the odds catch up with him. It's no spoiler to reveal that much of the play occurs as flashbacks to the days just before Tray caught four bullets to the chest and left everyone around him with empty hands and hopes. "Eighteen years old," his grandmother Lena (Catrina Ganey) recalls in her opening monologue, "and never had a cavity."

Raised by Lena with his younger half-sister, Devine (Kaatje Welsh), on the outer edge of gentrifying Brooklyn, Curtiss Cook Jr.'s Tray navigates the streets, filled with childhood friends-turned-gang-bangers, the gym, school, his family, and his Asian American former stepmother Merrell (Sung Yun Cho), a cleaned-up drug addict trying to reconnect. He looks and behaves like a regular kid: constantly examining his phone, clad in a hoodie, snapback hat, Beats slung around his neck. But he carries a man's set of responsibilities, and Ganey's Lena maintains an uneasy balance of humor, warmth, and strength.

Scott Bradley's set, Russel Champa's lighting, and Ryan Rumery's sound echo Tray's efforts to make it out of his neighborhood and the ways it keeps invading anyway. Grandmother Lena's home sits below an El train trestle that stretches into the audience, intermittently rattling and flashing. And in this, as well as in nearly every scene featuring Cook and another performer (his hip-hop pas de deux with Welsh is particularly affecting), the depth of Lee's script and characters shine through.

Lee's dialogue takes a while to warm up, however, and director Eric Ting often gets in the way, allowing staccato conversations and emphasizing cuteness over complexity. It's telling that the final words of Tray's college essay, "It's not the end, it's the beginning!" are read as a triumph and evoke charmed laughter from the audience.

But this is the right play at the right moment, and it features one of the most diverse casts and crew I've seen on and around a Philly stage. The production asks questions worth asking: What do we do with all the dead young men of color and the ripples their absence leaves behind? brownsville song (b-side for tray) shows just how much those lost lives matter.

Through May 31 at Suzanne Roberts Theatre, Broad and Lombard Streets Tickets: $46 to $59. Information: 215-985-0420 or PhiladelphiaTheatreCompany.org.EndText