Turning Back Time at Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

But while Familiar is (at its heart) about life in an immigrant family and the unique cognitive dissonance the internal identities of immigrants hold, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (Guess Who) is really about the external realities of existence itself. Rather than asking Who Am I?, Guess Who simply asks: Why? Why are our cultural expectations of relationships the way they are? Why are we expected to segregate ourselves? Why are our differences emphasized rather than celebrated? Why does anyone get to have a say in your relationship who isn’t a part of the relationship itself?

Through a series of cringe-laugh-inducing vignettes, Guess Who (mostly) deftly navigates those questions in a way that lands a serious subject with a light blow. We see the happy couple radiate with love; we see their parents’ utter dismay at their clear mutual interest; we see a satellite of other characters convincing the parents to trust their children despite all of their training to do otherwise. This is a script that is not afraid to have hard conversations in front of you, and there is a sense of voyeurism in watching the Draytons and Prentices navigate their dismay over finding themselves in a situation they could never have imagined before.

This story could easily be an uncomfortable mess without strong guidance, and Director Timothy Bond has assembled a rock star cast to help him deftly navigate the tricky material. Guthrie stalwart Sally Wingert is back as Christina Drayton. It’s always tough to embody a role made famous by an actor as iconic as say, Katharine Hepburn, but Wingert makes it look easy with her expressive face and sharp wit. Speaking of inhabiting iconic roles, JaBen Early is marvelous as Dr. John Prentice. I was curious how they would put up this role that Sidney Poitier made possible; wisely, rather than trying to play Poitier, Early makes it completely his own. He has a modern, classy touch, and I thoroughly enjoyed his grounded performance. He’s definitely a keeper. Regina Marie Williams is great here too as the Drayton’s maid Tillie. Her role may seem insignificant, but to me, it’s the crux of the entire show, and made stronger by Williams’ adroit performance. Tillie is the bridge between all of these worlds; her intimate knowledge of the Draytons, her lived experience as a black woman in 1960s America, and her feet squarely planted with a black perspective living in a wealthy white world help us to the understanding that all of us can carry flawed perceptions, and all of us can overcome them. Williams does a wonderful job steering this story, and the show would be much poorer without her presence.

The rest of the cast is good too. Peter Thomson is a genuine comedic spotlight as Monsignor Ryan and often ironically voices the soundest reason of any character in the show. Greta Oglesby and Derrick Lee Weeden are profound as Dr. Prentice’s parents Mary and John, respectively; their reaction, short but powerfully played here, is hard to watch but necessary. Maeve Coleen Moynihan is vivacious as Joanna Drayton, showing great chemistry with Early and a stark moral compass for the plot. And Michelle Duffy gets into her best Doloris Umbridge vibe whilst performing the sickening social climbing of Hilary St. George.

Photo by Dan Norman

Photo by Dan Norman

That being said, there are some things about this story that didn’t age well, I thought, although this isn’t the fault of the production itself. The conversation we see on stage is still vital, but the reception of it felt flawed. When Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner first hit the silver screen in 1967, there were very few positive images of interracial relationships in popular culture, and the reception was as intense as you might imagine. Fifty years later, as with so many issues concerning race in the North (and particularly passive aggressively liberal states like Minnesota), we are able to watch a play like Guess Who and pat ourselves on the back for progress and an exceedingly judgmental eye towards the past without seeing the enormous amount of work left to do. This issue is beautifully explained in my first ever guest post back in 2016 (click here to read – it’s a great summary from one of the smartest people I know), but it’s something we need to talk about more. Interracial marriage is legal now, but the reception of such relationships is still problematic, and we need to do much better in general on directly closing the racial equality gap in all ways. I didn’t get the sense from the laughs around me that the audience quite understood that; the point of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is to show how deeply all of us harbor prejudice and how actively we need to root it out. It’s not enough to claim liberalism or charity donations or op eds in the newspaper; we need to be actively fighting racism in our every day actions and inner thoughts, and that takes unending, exhausting work that goes far beyond writing a signature in a chequebook.