Transition at Asheville Community Theatre
Theatrical debuts are tough, but when they’re as full of promise and potential as Ria Young’s Transition, one can’t help but want to see what the playwright does next.
Opening with a mesmerizing modern Shakespearean monologue by Mali (a cool, confident Kasia Maatafale), daring the audience to reveal what they see when they look at her, the semi-autobiographical drama centers on the star player of her college’s women’s basketball team as she struggles through ambiguous internal turmoil. Beyond the court, she’s a bit of a reclusive mess, but has managed to surround herself with a close-knit group of friends consisting of Rashawn (Ronals “Leo Era” Hedd), Nessa (Kirby Gibson), and Kah (Naimah Coleman).
The four-person ensemble quickly establishes a compelling rapport, relaying Young’s authentic, lived-in experiences that intelligently convey the closeness among friends, even those with whom we have drama and/or falling outs. Though somewhat one-note in her antagonism, Coleman effectively prickles Maatafale, who’s as believable combatting this friction as she is seeking solace with Hedd and Gibson, both of whom push and support her the way truly concerned friends do.
Precisely what plagues Mali grows clearer as her post-collegiate basketball career is threatened. And though she encouragingly comes to admit that depression and her related woes were suppressed for not being things commonly talked about within the Black community, there’s an intriguing but somewhat frustrating sense of unaddressed conflicts running deeper than merely owning up to these issues and accepting a life after athletics.
Engaging as these dynamics are, their staging feels somewhat at odds with the sharpness of the writing. Young originally conceived Transition for Asheville Community Theatre’s 35below black box space, yet doesn’t much scale up the production to take advantage of the Mainstage’s capabilities, instead keeping all action to its large center area.
Mali’s frequent wardrobe changes leave an uncomfortable amount of time between her consecutive scenes, themselves far too numerous and often seemingly of equal length as the changes themselves. That interrupted flow might also have proven problematic at 35below, suggesting a need to combine certain scenes, but with the Mainstage’s dual wings capable of hosting locations Young returns to on multiple occasions (e.g. Mali’s dorm room and the basketball court), and imagery on a projection screen ably relaying larger spaces in which multiple characters interact (e.g. the campus quad), the potential to avoid costly movements of the sparse props is there yet goes unused.
While the overly short scenes may be emblematic of Young’s inexperience as a director, she shows flashes of greatness in her helming of Mali’s pair of Act II talks with her therapist (Coleman, showing the other side of her range from the fiery Kah). Practically Transition’s lone moments allowed to play out beyond a few exchanges, the extended stretches prove that Young is capable of crafting rich, longer scenes — and that her cast can handle the pressures that come with raw, sustained acting.
(Photo by Michael-Jamar Jean Francois)
