At worst well, imagine the play today's white liberal academic might pen about racial conflict if it were full of similar sound and unedited fury. True to the wobbly text, the Mint Theater Company has mounted Welcome to Our City with a weird sloppiness enjoyable for all the wrong reasons. The plot is blunt. A territorial dispute erupts in Altamont, as Mr. Rutlege, whose family lost all but their good name in the Civil War, attempts to buy back his estate from former slaves in order to sell it to whites at inflated prices. But not all of the black people fall for the scheme, least of all Dr. Johnson, the town's one wealthy black man.
Tensions mount, and a riot breaks out.
Northern and Southern racism are different animals, after all. The fascinating heirloom is murdered almost delightfully by a wildly uneven cast. Scarily uninvested, some going up on their lines even after a week of shows, the actors clunk through Our City like sumo wrestlers. Yet perhaps there is no more appropriate metaphor for the awkwardness of U.S. race relations than bad acting shared equally by blacks and whites alike. While the puppet's base resembles a table stand, and the midsection X-rays of human lungs, the figure's changing expression led me to the foolhardy notion that the sculpted head was pasted over with some kind of revolutionary hologram.