Dot

A gently swung version of “My Favorite Things” plays at the start of Colman Domingo’s Dot, as the windows of a West Philadelphia home light up on the show’s pointillist curtain. Then that curtain rises, and BANG!: In a blinding change of light, we are in the house’s kitchen, where everything is yellow and too much is yelled. Susan Stroman’s direction seems pitched to the balcony of a far larger theater than the Vineyard. “The people that I know in West Philly have the dryest delivery,” writes Domingo in his stage directions; there isn’t a dry line in this house.  

 

The production’s bigger-broader-louder appoach does not cast the most flattering possible light on Domingo’s already overstuffed dramedy, about a middle-class African-American family whose matriarch, Dotty (Marjorie Johnson), is losing her mind to Alzheimer’s. There are likable characters and comedic bits worth savoring—including  a vivacious turn by Libya V. Pugh as Dotty’s wildest child—but they don’t have room to breathe; the show’s affectionate embrace of black and gay stereotypes becomes too tight a grip, and the heart gets squeezed out. Though amusing, Dot comes off as a sitcom that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be, an episode of The Cosby Show directed as The Jeffersons.—Adam Feldman

 

 

Follow Adam Feldman on Twitter: @FeldmanAdam