Is hip-hop an intrinsically Black art form? Is it also inherently straight, misogynist and homophobic? These questions and many, many more besides are asked in Dan McCabe’s play about cultural ownership and prejudice, which premiered to acclaim in Boston in 2019, two years after he graduated from Juilliard.
Amit Sharma’s production for his first season at the Kiln Theatre reveals The Purists to be an intriguing but rambling work, fascinating and frustrating by turns, illuminated here by blazing performances from Sule Rimi and relative newcomer Tiffany Gray.
Veteran DJ Mr Bugz (Richard Pepple) lives in the Queens apartment adjacent to Gerry Brinsler (Jasper Britton), a curmudgeonly fan of classic Broadway musicals who frittered away his fortune after seeing all his friends die of Aids. They often meet and bicker on the front stoop, where Bugz wiles away his time arguing about the best-ever rappers with sometime rap superstar Lamont (Rimi). Oh, and Gerry’s young Puerto Rican drug-dealer Val (Gray) is also an aspiring MC who’s shared a stage, among other things, with Bugz.
There’s too much going on here. Bugz’s mom is dying of Alzheimer’s, as he endlessly, lugubriously mentions, and a scandal is hovering over him. Lamont ostensibly rejects the violent and sexist brand of rap promoted by white executives but his version of “authenticity” throws up its own prejudices. Having lost his paintbrush fortune (sorry?), Gerry now runs a cold-calling phone service (I think) and hopes to write a musical about Emperor Augustus (WTF?).
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Meanwhile his young, white, female employee Nancy (Emma Kingston) idolises Lamont, and has written a hip-hop musical about aviator Amelia Earhart (again, WTF?). Don’t even get me started on the digressions about memory foam pillows, TV painter Bob Ross and banking app Venmo, or the prominent role played by Ferrero Rocher chocolates.
This is one of those plays where I didn’t believe the blatantly engineered situations for a minute but enjoyed the energetic arguments, jokes and vivid characters, at least until they dawdled off into a succession of blind alleys. All the actors give good value but Rimi is spellbinding as the fiery-eyed Lamont, and pulls off some pretty impressive pull-ups on Tom Piper’s scaffolding-and-graffiti set, too. Just as striking is Gray, previously seen in a comic turn at Hampstead Theatre, and here a vibrating, sinewy streak of raw emotion as Val.
By far the strongest moment in the play is the electric rap battle between her and Nancy, which sums up the play’s tangled ideas. It’s a contest meticulously scripted by a white male writer to sound improvised, between a white and a Hispanic woman, who are otherwise marginalised by older men, two black and one white, who all think they should own the narrative.
The Purists is ungoverned and sprawling and never resolves its thorny questions about identity and authenticity, but it generates much enjoyment as well as much head-scratching along the way.
