By Robert Israel

At its best, this script offers an opportunity for audiences to cast a backward glance at the first stirrings of dramatist Lynn Nottage’s prolific canon.

Crumbs from the Table of Joy, a two-act play by Lynn Nottage. Directed by Tasia A. Jones. Presented by Lyric Stage Boston, 140 Clarendon St., Boston, MA, through February 2.

Thomika Marie Bridwell, Madison Margaret Clark, and Dominic Carter in the Lyric Stage production of Crumbs from the Table of Joy. Photo: Mark S. Howard

Crumbs from the Table of Joy arrives in Boston a year and a half after Lynn Nottage’s award-winning – and nationally produced – one-act play Clyde’s, which local audiences got to enjoy in a socko production by Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company. Now onstage at the Lyric, Crumbs, a predominantly quiet, two-act play, is a study in contrast when compared with the raucous and expletive-ridden Clyde’s. The script appears three decades after it was first produced off-Broadway. A Brown University graduate who studied with playwright Paula Vogel, Nottage has since been awarded two Pulitzer Prizes in Drama (for Ruined and Sweat) and, at age 60, she continues to write operas, musicals, and scripts for stage, television, and the movies. Crumbs – the title comes from Langston Hughes’ poem “Luck” – turns out to be less compelling than her other works. At its best, the drama presents an opportunity for audiences to cast a backward glance at the first stirrings of Nottage’s prolific canon.

Set in the 1950s, the play focuses on the Crump family, who have migrated from the Jim Crow south to New York where “colored people,” as Black folks are referred to in the script, face the same suffocating discrimination they thought they were escaping from south of the Mason-Dixon. A memory play, Crumbs is narrated by Ernestine (Madison Margaret Clark), a bobby-socks wearing, bespectacled teen who is struggling to find her place in her new environs as a motherless child. She shares the crowded flat with her born-again father Godfrey (Dominic Carter), her sister Ermina (Catia) and, mid-act, her aunt Lily Ann Green (Thomika Marie Bridwell) who moves in with them. In the second act, another woman will enter her world, her father’s new bride, Gerta (Bridgette Hayes), a refugee from Germany (who yearns to achieve the celebrity status of Marlene Dietrich but is happy to have snared an American man as a husband).

The set for this apartment, effectively designed by Cristina Todesco, is evocative of the ’50s, with its overstuffed sofa and doilies and large arm chair where Godfrey, the only wage-earner, rules over his roost. It reminded me of the interiors of apartments during my own youth, with its heavy dark drapes, muted light, and predominance of mahogany. We are taken to a time before television, when a radio, positioned prominently on its own end table, served as the only electronic link to the outside world. This was the era of the GI Bill, the years after World War II, when the trappings of success were promised to all. Folks were told that the tide of prosperity would lift all boats. But, as Hughes warned in many of his poems, those who had been left behind were kept behind. Ernestine provides some of the evidence on stage; she will soon become the first high-school graduate in the family. But she will only receive the “crumbs” of that promised largesse. She is seen stitching a white graduation dress, her supposed ticket to success. I was reminded of Roy deCarava’s photo of a young woman in a similar resplendent dress standing amidst the rubble of a garbage-strewn empty lot, representative of poignant black and white images of Black folks in Harlem struggling to survive can (check out this edition of Hughes’ The Sweet Flypaper of Life).

Thomika Marie Bridwell and Bridgette Hayes in the Lyric Stage production of Crumbs from the Table of Joy. Photo: Mark S. Howard

There are moments when the cast performs as a tight ensemble, but that is not the case throughout the over two-hour running time. There are problems with voice projection, which means that heartfelt speeches about finding one’s way in this prejudiced world wind up getting lost. The weight of Nottage’s lugubrious script contributes to the awkward patches — at times her characters repeat each other’s lines rather than move the scene forward.

A bittersweet nostalgia underlies every scene and, while it is evocative of the aforementioned era, the wistfulness works against the production. The experience feels stuck in time; the script does not invite viewers in to discover how these characters, facing overwhelming dilemmas, are struggling to find a way to free themselves from that “flypaper of life.”

There are moments of levity, snippets of a song, a sudden burst of movement when a character cozies up to another player and strikes a spark, a brief hope for a significant encounter. But those sparks, like the missed strokes of a flint on stone, don’t ever ignite.

Kudos goes to Eduardo Ramirez’s moody lighting design and Mikayla Reid’s wonderful costumes, which bring us into less prosperous times. Nottage suggests that light will eventually flood these shadowy rooms. But, for the time being, the Crump family will be required to wait in the dark.

Robert Israel, an Arts Fuse contributor since 2013, can be reached at risrael_97@yahoo.com.