The curtain lifts on three Black men hanging from a tree. It is a shocking sight. Director Zora Howard has the audience sit with this tableau for an uncomfortably long time. We become complicit, a part of the mob that lynched these men. The silence lasts a few minutes – it feels much longer.
Hang Time is set in a purgatorial space (there is a hint of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos and the idea of hell being other people), these three men chewing the fat as if they were sat on a porch not swinging from a rope. They discuss their lovers and the Blues, losses and regrets. They admire the figure of a woman walking past and wonder what they’ll do come payday. The cognitive dissonance of watching these men discuss their interrupted lives as if they were continuing is unsettling.
There is a clear Biblical allusion in the three men suspended together: Christ on the cross flanked by the two thieves. The central figure – freighted with the name Blood (Bryce Foley) – is young and innocent seeming, his dreams of escape and seeing the wide world cut brutally short. His visions of volcanoes and pink seas are simultaneously beautiful and futile.
Bird (Julian Rozzell) is older, wiser, more comfortable in retirement and in his faith. Kamal Bolden’s Slim is a loquacious trouble-maker, chasing women and the next buck. Only later do we see his façade crack, his laugh a hacking choke.
Howard’s script is – remarkably, considering the context – lovely and poetic, whether the characters are discussing sex or the dawning of a new day. It is delivered precisely and rhythmically by the three actors, who together give a finely tuned, interlocking vocal performance.
There is also an astonishing amount of physical performance, given none of the performers take a single step. Never has the turn of a head or the clenching of a hand been quite so eloquent. When they step forward to take their bow, each actor is visibly spent, wrung out physically and emotionally from the strain.
The production’s design is in some ways remarkably simple, but no less effective for all that. Neal Wilkinson’s set conjures the visceral shock of seeing the men hang – really hang. The sound design by Megan Culley is full of the chirr of cicadas, the ominous barking of dogs in the distance. The costumes (Dominique Fawn Hill) are indeterminate, this could be happening 100 years ago or tomorrow. Reza Behjat’s stark lighting conjures a train out of the darkness so palpable you can smell the hot metal.
Of course, Hang Time is not just a literal story of three Black men lynched by a mob. At separate moments in the performance, each actor portrays what might be the moment of their character’s hanging, but there is never any verbal allusion to their ends or the violence that presumably preceded them. The play also functions as a metaphor for how Black men are set up to fail by modern society, by an industrial prison complex that criminalises them, by models of masculinity that keep them trapped.
Watching the bodies slowly twist in the breeze, hearing the vibrant lives that were and might yet have been, we are forced to confront the racialised violence there has been, and the racialised violence there still is.
Performed at the Royal Lyceum Theatre on 20 August as part of the Edinburgh International Festival
21 and 22 August, 20:00; 22 and 23 August, 15:00
Running time: 1 hour, no interval
Writer, Director & Producer: Zora Howard
Set Designer: Neal Wilkinson
Lighting Designer: Reza Behjat
Costume Designer: Dominique Fawn Hill
Sound Designer: Megan Culley
Cast: Kamal Bolden, Bryce Foley, Julian Rozzell