In Stephen Adly Guirgis’s new play is a meditation on power, race, and class in a broken society, Stephen McKinley Henderson gives a masterful performance as Walter Washington, a former New York City policeman whose retirement is marked in large part by the eight-year-long lawsuit he has been leveeing against his former employers in response to having been shot six times while off duty by a white rookie cop.
The city has offered Walter a settlement, but he refuses on principle: “an honorable man can’t be bought off,” he says, “an honorable man doesn’t just settle a lawsuit ‘No Fault’ and lend his silence to hypocrisy and racism and the grievous violation of all our Civil Rights.” Walter maynot have much, but he will fight tirelessly for the little reputation he has left. This battle becomes more difficult by being fought on two separate fronts: Walter lives in one of the last remaining rent controlled apartments on Riverside Drive, and the landlord would like nothing more than to evict him in favor of a tenant to pay full price. This is another battle about which Walter feels confident—he has got a legal lease, after all—but he weakens his position by ignoring the criminal activities of his adult son, Junior (Ray Anthony Thomas), giving the landlord leverage which the city is all too eager to exploit in an attempt to make Walter settle his lawsuit.
Life is precarious for Walter, and yet as the play opens he sits in his bathrobe, calmly reading the paper while he eats pie and sips whisky for breakfast, unfazed by the powerful forces closing in on him. His breakfast companion is Oswaldo (Victor Almanzar), a recovering addict friend of Junior’s who has been staying in the apartment freely for some time. Walter refuses even the possibility of rent, as he insists the Oswaldo is a guest and “guests don’t pay rent.”
This opening scene is in many ways indicative of the fascinating portrait of a man that Guirgis and Henderson have crafted in Walter Washington. Regardless of how much pressure the city exerts on him to bend, he will enjoy his unhealthy breakfast with his nefarious houseguest just as he pleases, because that is how he sees best fit to run his life.
As the play progresses, pressure from the city for Walter to settle his lawsuit and end their headache of bad press will increase in the persons of his former partner Audrey (Elizabeth Caravan) and her fiancé Dave (Michael Rispoli), who the force has enlisted in an attempt to exploit Walter’s trust in order to convince him to settle. When backed into a corner by Audrey and Dave, the dimension of Walter the Fighter emerges, and we come to see that the warm patriarch of a welcoming apartment is a more jagged man than he first appeared, capable of cutting when tested.
Henderson explores the tension between Walter the tender family man and Walter the bitter man fighting for what he feels he deserves throughout Between Riverside and Crazy. This is a complex portrait of a man who manages to surprise us whenever we think we might be starting understand his drives. At times he seems fully in control of life and its challenges, and at other times he seems to be driving his train off the rails. But in the hands of Henderson, the character remains at all times utterly human and deeply relatable. His anger is mercurial, and his motives seemingly less than logical, but Walter has made room for the demons in his life. He may not be able to control those demons, but he makes no apologies for the life he has lead and continues to live, despite nearly everybody in the play telling him he should live it differently.
Walter is neither angel nor devil, and the play offers no excuses and lays no blame for his troubles. It asks us instead to consider stakes of a the volatile union between a life like Walter’s and the politics of a contemporary society. The city may wish for the effects of that union to make Walter silent and invisible, but life for Walter has left deep scars which he bears willingly as markers of time and experience.
Under the direction of Austin Pendleton and upon the marvelously nimble set by Walt Spangler, the performances throughout are strong. Some of the plot lines feel underdeveloped and there’s a bit of clunky exposition, but the play is ultimately an exploration of a man whose soul is as murky as his past and Henderson brings this man vividly to life.