“Crumbs from the Table of Joy” is an entertaining, engaging, and engrossing two-act play about the life of the African American Crump family in 1950s Brooklyn. With fine performances and heartfelt writing by double Pulitzer Prize winner and MacArthur “Genius” Fellow Lynn Nottage (b.1964), we understand and empathize with the family. The play’s title comes from the Langston Hughes poem “Luck,” which suggests that love and happiness are not given out equally — some only receive crumbs of joy until they reach heaven.
“Crumbs from the Table of Joy” is a memory play and a coming-of-age story of one family’s experiences as they make their way during the early stages of integration and recovery from their personal grief. After the recent death of his wife, grief-stricken, overwhelmed, stern father Godfrey (David Everett Moore) moved with his two teenage daughters from the rural South to a basement Brooklyn apartment. And unlike most Black families moving north for economic advancement, born-again Godfrey made his somewhat desperate move to be closer to his savior and idol, the cultish Reverend Father Divine (an actual religious leader of the time).
We learn this from his 17-year-old daughter Ernestine (excellent Anna Marie Sharpe), a serious, intelligent girl. She alternates between acting her role in the play and narrating and reporting on the action by speaking directly to the audience. Her younger sister, the playful and mischievous 15-year-old Ermina, completes the nuclear family (Jamella Cross makes the most of her role).
But then their sassy, outspoken Aunt Lily, their deceased mother’s sister, suddenly shows up with suitcases and moves herself in (vivacious, attention-grabbing performance by Asia Nicole Jackson). Lily is an unapologetic Communist who drinks alcohol, listens to jazz, and loves to dance in Harlem — the opposite of the teetotalling, ultra-strict, no-radios-on-Sundays Godfrey.
As the drama continues, to the family’s shock, Godfrey impulsively marries Gerte (first-rate Carrie Paff), a white German immigrant, and they fight a new brand of discrimination. Gerte’s naïve unfamiliarity with America’s racial prejudices is a sad commentary on the 1950s state of ethnic intolerance. Ironically, Gerte, as a recent German refugee after World War II, is herself a victim of a different kind of discrimination.
At the end of the play, Ernestine directly addresses the audience and tells us what happened to her and her family past the action’s finale into her adulthood. It’s a rare, satisfying conclusion for those of us who are always curious to know the end of the story.
“Crumbs from the Table of Joy,” Nottage’s first major full-length play, premiered Off-Broadway in 1995. One can see in this work the foundations of her more forceful works, such as 2015’s “Sweat,” her powerful and dramatic look at workers in the Rust Belt facing the demise of their union jobs. New York’s Second Stage Theatre commissioned “Crumbs from the Table of Joy” as part of their program for teen audiences. Teens can identify with the daughters’ personal story despite the differences in the setting and would learn from the historical allusions to the 1950s communist scare, racism, sexism, and the dawn of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. At the same time, it is also captivating for adults.
By Emily S. Mendel
emilymendel@gmail.com
©Emily S. Mendel 2025 All Rights Reserved
