“It’s all fiction,” says Leslie (Nikkole Salter), a Black writer leading her own HBO (MAX) show in playwright Inda Craig–Galván’s world premiere play A Jumping-Off Point. The line is delivered as a bit of wry wisdom, but the flippancy of it undercuts the compromises and mistakes Leslie has made to get this point. In this play, under the direction of Jade King Caroll, fictions have real consequences—a subject Craig-Galván, herself a veteran of television writers’ rooms, explores here, but that audiences only barely get to know over the play’s 90-minute run time.
A Jumping-Off Point opens with Leslie on the precipice of signing her deal. While celebrating with friend and roommate Miriam (Cristina Pitter), she receives an ominous message from Andrew (Danny Gavigan), a former classmate from her writing program. Andrew later barges into her apartment, accusing her of plagiarizing his story about a Black community in the Mississippi Delta and using it to kick-start her career. Leslie confesses to using Andrew’s work as a jumping-off point but accuses him of appropriating a story that he, a White man from the Midwest, had no business telling in the first place. Miriam steps in to broker a compromise: Andrew will keep his mouth shut in exchange for receiving “on the job training” as, horror of horrors, a member of Leslie’s writing staff.
As Leslie, Salter comfortably essays a brilliant but flawed woman who, as her opening address to the audience demonstrates, is keenly aware of the pressure on Black artists—especially Black women artists—to perform perfection in the public eye. In several of the play’s comic highlights, Leslie attempts to use this to her advantage, alternately affecting contrition and determination at press junkets while hiding an ambitious streak that verges on bullying. Salter handles each of Leslie’s modes gracefully, but the play sometimes forces her to turbocharge her intensity, ostensibly for the purposes of narrative convenience.
“There are no villains,” says Miriam. “No heroes and villains, just people.” It’s wise counsel, yet there are points at which Leslie very nearly slots into the dark side of that dichotomy in a manner that goes beyond Craig-Galván’s efforts to productively complicate the story. Troubling matters is the fact that Leslie styles her show as a breakthrough for Black voices, but A Jumping-Off Point gives us little indication of what the show is about or the qualities of Leslie’s own, distinct voice that makes the show the breakthrough it’s purported to be.
Leslie’s rocky journey is a microcosm of the play as a whole: it’s built on solid foundations, well stewarded by Carroll, but not fully fleshed out. Pitter’s Miriam excels at stirring shit up one moment and being the voice of reason the next, but her choice to counsel Andrew almost as much as Leslie raises the question: What’s in this for her? As Andrew, Gavigan finds a nice balance between boneheaded White male privilege—the man is awfully quick to take up space in Leslie’s home—and lost boy sensitivity, all while potentially hiding a craftier disposition than he lets on. It’s a credit to Craig-Galván that he has some layers, but all the more frustrating—perhaps intentionally so—that they are stripped away at the play’s conclusion in a nice piece of symmetry that drives home the power dynamics still operating in Hollywood and beyond.
It all unfolds in Moyenda Kulemeka’s costumes, with Leslie’s trim slacks and chic tops contrasting nicely with Andrew’s plain T-shirts and backward cap. The backdrop of Meghan Raham’s rotating set, done up in patchwork shades of gray, forms a flexible and suitably open canvas despite being monochromatic to the point of being monolithic. A large turntable facilitates scene changes, though the sheer amount of revolutions the set makes only clarifies how scattered the latter parts of the story become as Leslie and Andrew navigate their fitful, combative partnership.
Ultimately, A Jumping-Off Point is more than Andrew’s ill-conceived project and Leslie’s ill-gotten starter, but it still feels like the beginning of an incisive look at who gets to tell what stories. Like many such tales that center race and gender, it has a way of revealing biases across the board; I certainly wonder if that was the case for the audience member behind me who less-than-subtly summed up Leslie as a “bitch” on no less than three occasions during the show. Perhaps that alone is evidence that fiction can reveal inconvenient truths about ourselves (and others). As for the characters in this fiction, I often found myself hungry to know them better.
A Jumping-Off Point, written by Inda Craig-Galván and directed by Jade King Carroll, runs through May 5 at Round House Theatre. roundhousetheatre.org. $46–$83.