Family ties are broken, frayed and knotted as past and present collide in Sunset Baby.

The one-act, eight-scene play is the inaugural production of BMA Inc. and the Detroit premiere of the three-character play by playwright and actress Dominique Morisseau first presented during a five-week run at the Labyrinth Theater Company in New York in November and December 2013.

Performed at the Black Box Theatre at Cass Technical High School in Detroit — an intimate space on the third floor of the high school–the nearly two-hour-long play is without an intermission, which is as emotionally exhausting to the audience as it must be to the three actors.

BMA, which is short for Bellomy McCormick Atkins, is an entertainment and arts company founded in Detroit by Daniel Bellomy, Marilyn McCormick and Harron Atkins. The company’s platforms include theater, web-series, film, music and social events. The entertainment and arts company is committed to creating opportunities for artists to create, inspire and entertain.

McCormick, the director of “Sunset Baby,” is BMA’s Artistic Director while Bellomy is Public Relations/Executive Director of BMA and Atkins is Creative Associate/Creative Director.

Politics wrangle with apolitical survival instincts in the play, which is a series of one-on-one dialogues on the main stage intercut with a small platform offstage, where Kenyatta, a legendary activist from the Black Power movement of more than a generation ago, periodically takes up a stool and videotapes himself ruminating on fatherhood, failure, justice and injustice.

Played by Brian Marable, Kenyatta makes an attempt after a 20-plus-year estrangement to reach out to his daughter Nina, brought to smoldering life by Janeé Ann Smith.

Kenyatta’s intentions aren’t truly directed toward healing the broken relationship. He’s more interested in reconnecting with a phantom: his dead wife, Ashanti X, like him a militant voice at the front of the Black Power movement. (The picture of Ashanti on a wall in Nina’s flat actually is an iconic, circa-1970 image of Angela Davis, a radical feminist, Communist and close associate of the Black Panther Party.)

Even in his soliloquies, Kenyatta doesn’t effectively defend his choice decades ago to put the Revolution above his family–although he somewhat confusingly insists to his daughter that she was conceived with the intention of carrying on said revolution.

Their only meaningful connection is in the form of a handful of letters written by Ashanti to Kenyatta while he was imprisoned for robbing an armored truck. Nina, who, as a consequence, grew up fatherless and watched as a drug habit slowly killed her mother, has inherited the letters and scoffs at his plea to simply read them–sneering that their value, to her, is mostly monetary, having attracted the interest of scholars, book publishers and producers.

Nina hasn’t done anything with the letters, however. She’s getting by dealing drugs in concert with her boyfriend, Damon, played by Sean Rodriguez Sharpe with less menace than one might expect of a petty but successful criminal in New York.

Props to set design (Carl & Bonnie Nielsen) and set construction (Malcolm Harris and Michael Bishop) for making the small space of Nina’s drug-dealer-chic apartment look authentic. Kudos also to Technical Director Marshall Tolbert and Sound Design Lumumba Reynolds and Sound PAs Malcolm Harris and Michael Bishop, who never miss a beat during the fast-paced performance. Other credits include Light Design – Andre Putnam, Dramaturg – Goldie Patrick and Assistant Director – Craig Ester.

Nina also has introspective moments but, unlike her father delivering thoughts in front of a camcorder, they come while she stands in front of a full-length mirror, smoothing her straight blond wig and miniskirt before hitting the streets or else braiding and unbraiding her hair, silently depicting her conflicting identities as both a no-BS Material Girl and the Afro’d revolutionary envisioned by her parents. Smith convincingly keeps bitterness from sliding into self-pity when she allows us a glimpse inside that hard-as-nails persona.

Most of the threads of these strained family ties are left dangling at the end of Sunset Baby. It’s up to us to imagine where they might lead, and to hope it’s not a dead end of emptiness for these three sorrowful characters.

Bottom Line: A riveting and impressive debut for BMA

–with Jim Irwin contributing

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