Felicia Curry as Jacqueline Marie Butler
It is a long, LONG way from Queens to Nigeria, and from Nigeria to Vermont. Such is the series of journeys that form Caleen Sinnette Jennings’ Queens Girl trilogy of single-actor plays. Baltimore’s Everyman Theatre is now streaming the final entry in the series, “Queens Girl: Black in the Green Mountains,” directed by Associate Artistic Director Paige Hernandez and starring Felicia Curry.
By itself, this is a gorgeous piece of theater well worthy of one’s time. It is also a highly persuasive argument to see the other plays of the trilogy.
In the first two installments, we saw Jennings’ character, Jackie, transition from girlhood in New York to adolescence at the International School in Nigeria. There she endured more than just the typical fish-out-of-water ordeals, code-switching her way through a different world’s idea of the mid-1960s. As this installment begins, we find Jackie returning to the U.S., enrolled at Bennington College in Vermont. As one of only 12 black students at the prestigious school, Jackie must cope with culture shock, finding her calling, and absorbing the many shifts that had occurred in America during her three year absence. It’s a lot. She writes to a friend “I am overwhelmed by the round-the-clock whiteness of this place,” and the words convey an outsider’s genuine bewilderment.