The first meeting between Kenyatta and Nina is tense, as it surely would be for any father and daughter who have not seen each other for many years. But their encounter in this revival of Dominique Morisseau’s decade-old play could not be more fraught.

Kenyatta  Shakur (Russell Hornsby), a black revolutionary who spent many years in prison after robbing an armored truck to fund the cause, hasn’t seen Nina since she was five years old, more than two decades ago.  He and Nina’s mother, Ashanti X, had named Nina after the singer Nina Simone, because “she was our rebel music. You were going to be our revolution.” But Ashanti  wound up hooked on crack and recently died from her addiction.  And when Kenyatta first sees Nina (Moses Ingram), she is dressed in a chartreuse wig, shiny black miniskirt and thigh-high boots. This is her business attire:  She works with her boyfriend Damon (J. Alphonse Nicholson) as a drug dealer, and a scam artist,  pretending to be a prostitute in order to lure men for Damon to rob. Nina sums up: “I sell drugs and rob niggas. Ashanti X died with an addiction. And your ass is coming back here to be sentimental. Ain’t nothin‟ sentimental about a dead revolution.”

If the set-up feels overwhelming, overwrought, what unfolds is slow-moving and too often muddled. And, given the marked theatrical shift over the past few years, as well as the change in Morisseau’s own writing, “Sunset Baby” feels out of date.

Now, Morisseau is an intelligent and compassionate playwright, and the characters she creates are too complex to dismiss simply as stereotypes. Kenyatta is thoughtful and low-key. Damon is well-read, and well-spoken (“You talk a lot,” Kenyatta observes); he also tries to be a good father to his son from an earlier relationship. Nina went to college, dropping out only because she had to take care of her mother. She watches the Travel Channel and dreams of a life in London; Damon wants to make her dream happen.

And there are potential questions raised by the play that might animate some theatergoers, such as: Is real revolution possible? Must one choose between changing the world and surviving? Are love and revolution incompatible? What is the cost of youthful idealism? 

It’s also hard to fault the acting, under Steve H. Broadnax III’s assured direction; one can certainly appreciate the generous display of Nina Simone’s music.

But Morisseau has become a much better playwright in the decade since she wrote this play.   The action in “Sunset Baby” is driven by a plot that’s full of holes: Ashanti left behind a raft of letters that she wrote, but didn’t send, to Kenyatta, which are now in great demand from journalists and academics, who are apparently willing to pay a lot of money for them. Kenyatta wants them too; is it for the money? We aren’t sure at first. 

And, then, the scenes between the characters, which include some clever and crackling dialogue, are interspersed with long monologues by Kenyatta that are presented simultaneously on stage and on projected video. In previous productions, these have been described as poetic; that strikes me in this case as a euphemism for precious, pretentious. Here’s the first few moments of the first one: “Fatherhood. Complex. Complicated. An abstract concept. Not clearly definable. Stages. For sure there are stages. Levels of its affectiveness. Affectionless. Manhood….” This doesn’t feel like an adequate substitute for a carefully developed glimpse into Kenyatta’s internal life.

Morisseau’s later plays are not just better constructed.  In such works as  “Skeleton Crew,” about a financially-threatened group of Detroit auto workers, and “Pipeline,” about a teacher who fights on behalf of her son (but also fights her doubts about her son), the playwright avoids the trap  articulated in the recent movie American Fiction, and, in the plays of (and interviews with) Michael R. Jackson. Yes, some Black people are drug dealers and convicts and crack addicts, and like any other characters, they deserve to be depicted in the full flower of their humanity.  But so do the vast range of other characters — such as, say, a minimum wage school security guard like the one in “Pipeline,” named Dun, who is intelligent and caring and also flirtatious and adulterous.

In “Sunset Baby,” Nina too is flawed but complicated; she ultimately seems destined to be like the woman she was named after, who, as Kenyatta says, was “full of brilliance and torment” and “was able to turn her madness into power.”  But it takes something away from the sophistication of the portrait that, like any TV drug dealer, she carries around a gun. 

Sunset Baby
Signature through March 10
Running time: 100 minutes with no intermission
Tickets: $49-$119
Written by Dominique Morisseau
Directed by Steve H. Broadnax III.
Wilson Chin (Scenic Designer), Emilio Sosa (Costume Designer), Alan C. Edwards (Lighting Designer), Curtis Craig (Co-Sound Designer), Jimmy Keys aka “J. Keys” (Co-Sound Designer), Katherine Freer (Projection/Video Designer), Ann C. James (Intimacy Coordinator/Cultural Specialist), Caparelliotis Casting (Casting)
Cast: Russell Hornsby as Kenyatta, Moses Ingram as Nina and J. Alphonse Nicholson as Damon.