Boiling Pot

Description
*** [THREE STARS] There’s no doubting the sincerity of Evan Joiner and Kobi Libii, the young men behind "Boiling Pot." Last year, the two (now-graduated) Yale students interviewed 125 Midwesterners about the nature of race and the role it has played in their lives; transcriptions of those encounters now form the basis of the pair’s earnest multicharacter docutheater piece, which splits roughly into three parts. (Each features long monologues in counterpoint.) In the strong middle section, a black college student examines his history of “white” social positioning, while a white teenager talks about being a minority in a mostly black high school. But although they are manifestly well-intentioned, neither the first third (about race in the 1950s and 1960s) nor the last (about radicalization in reaction to injustice) offers much that feels new. The show as a whole comes off as a good senior project—-Libii’s acting, in particular, is impressively natural throughout-—but as theater it falls a bit short: The pot boils over, but the ingredients, however carefully chopped, don’t quite amount to a soup.—-Adam Feldman, Theater Writer