Black Diamond: The Years The Locusts Have Eaten | Lookingglass Theatre Company
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Awareness of that fatigue runs throughout J. Nicole Brooks’s flawed but fascinating new play at Lookingglass, Black Diamond: The Years the Locusts Have Eaten, a ferocious look at recent history in Africa’s first republic, Liberia, founded by freed American slaves in 1822. In the first years of the 21st century it was embroiled in a civil war between the forces of President Charles Taylor (who went into exile in 2003 with an estimated $100 million siphoned from the government treasury) and a rebel army, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD).
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Despite Alana Arenas’s electrifying portrayal of Black Diamond and towering performances by the women in her squad, Brooks’s characters aren’t quite three-dimensional. She uses awkward dream sequences involving Fox’s epilepsy to segue into the history lessons. And in another first-play mistake, she lets her metaphors trump credibility: Fox cites Pandora’s box to illustrate how he sees Africa yet oddly doesn’t know that hope remained–a wise old African has to tell him. The play also feels like it has two or three endings, none of which really brings Black Diamond into the foreground.
