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Cleage generally likes her women mouthy and complicated. This is most obvious in Hospice: Alice, a celebrated but bitter poet, is cared for by her 30-year-old pregnant daughter, Jenny, whom Alice abandoned when she was ten to enjoy the bohemian life in 1960s Paris. (One character in Cleage’s Harlem Renaissance-era Blues for an Alabama Sky longs to move to Paris, and the abusive poet manque in Flyin’ West, set in Kansas, greatly prefers his expat life in London.) Hospice takes place in 1983 (when it was also first produced), in the comfortably shabby home of Alice’s late mother, who helped raise Jenny when Alice abandoned her and the girl’s father. Now in the last stages of cancer, Alice resents Jenny’s ministrations and taunts her about her attempts at “schoolgirl poetry” and her future as a single mother. She also makes it abundantly clear to Jenny, a film critic, that there will be no Hollywood-style rapprochement between them and accuses her of wanting “to make a fairy tale” out of her impending death. What Jenny gets instead is a whole lot of harsh truth spit out between doses of painkiller, washed down with sweet wine.
Alice is a welcome antidote to the stereotype of the noble, long-suffering black woman of unshakable faith, brilliantly sent up by George C. Wolfe in “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play” in The Colored Museum. As played by Tanya Lane, Alice is one seriously pissed-off woman with no intention of going gentle into that good night. Calling Jenny “sister” with an insinuating smirk emphasizes the lack of connection between them. And when Jenny asks once too often if Alice is OK, she snaps, “I’m not anywhere in the vicinity of ‘OK’ and I’m not going to be for the rest of the time you know me.”
As Ava, Wilkerson delivers rapid-fire proclamations on everything from her namesake (whom she insists was black passing for white) to her pimp: she gradually realizes he wasn’t such a good dude. These unfold in a series of blackouts punctuated by projected titles featuring a comic Ava-ism from the next scene. It’s highly reminiscent of David Mamet’s The Duck Variations, about geezers on a park bench. But there’s great tenderness in Ava. Though she seems like the sort of person who never shuts up long enough to notice anyone around her, she figures out a few things about ABW, eventually surmising that this disheveled, sullen woman is on the run from a mental hospital. “They just took all of it, didn’t they?” she says. “Every last bit and then they turned you out.”
