American Trade

by Tarell Alvin McCraney

When life in New York gets to hot to handle, charismatic hustler Pharus escapes the clutches of rap star Jules and moves to London. A funny, uncompromising about surviving in the big city that challenges our assumptions about racial and sexual identity, "American Trade" celebrates twenty-first-century London in all its extravagant diversity. Tarell Alvin McCraney's "American Trade" premiered at the Hampstead Theatre, London, in June 2011 in a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Genres: Plays, Drama

144 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2011

Reviews

[Aaron Thomas]

American Trade is subtitled "a Restoration comedy" and adopts that form's five-act structure. It also adopts the shallow bitchiness, clever quips, and sexual profligacy of the best plays from that era in British playwriting. But... I am not sure American Trade works very well. Or, rather, I think McCraney writes farce better than he writes mannered comedy. The farcical sequences in this play are hilarious; the wit works less well. As with all Restoration comedies, cleverness is rewarded, but it's hard to connect with the characters who win this game, and McCraney himself seems more disposed toward the losers in his schema. A proper Restoration comedy ends with an alliance, but the winning alliances here were with all the characters I disliked; the ones I liked ended up alone. No fun.