Intiman's current production of Native Son is so good, we hardly feel qualified to talk about it. Go see it. It's fast, with no intermission, and it burns through the pages of Richard Wright's 1940 text with a violence that doesn't dissipate when the thing ends and you're thrown out onto the streets of Seattle only to realize the play is still being acted out all around you. You can't really go home from this one.

In the play's most powerful scene, the anti-hero Bigger Thomas, a destitute black man from the slums of Chicago who lives in a single room with his mom and siblings, shows up at a rich white liberal's house for his first day of work. The assignment: chauffeur the radically liberal and dangerously sexy daughter to school in the Loop. Bigger's on his best behavior, dressed all smart, and obviously scared shitless, and you think he's going to pull it off, for better or worse, by stammering his way through an endless string of "Yessuh"s, even though just a few minutes ago, you saw him hold a knife to his crotch and force it into his best friend's mouth. The language trends towards the modern when Bigger's with his friends, by the way, and he's more likely to come up with, "That's how Bigger do," than "yessuh," and his friend isn't shy about letting go with a "Bigger please," or two when he's not being forced to fellate a blade. But from that atmosphere of rage, Bigger is tossed into the car with the bleeding heart daughter and her Marxist boyfriend who lavish him with booze, favors, and undue familiarity. "Oh let me drive, Bigger." "Take us to where black people go to eat, Bigger." "We're going to raise you up, Bigger." It's excruciating, and familiar, if not in its specifics then in the attitudes consistently on display all over the country to this day. The energy of that scene launches you through the rest of the play where worlds grow farther apart and people grow deader.

We could have done without the final act, though. Is it in the bylaws of the Communist party or something that these authors--Wright, here, Sinclair in The Jungle--have to spend two-thirds of their books spelling out the problem in beautiful and devastating detail through the lives of their protagonists and then burn the final third on retelling the whole story in Socialist-speak? It's like these guys are pamphleteers who, whoops, accidentally write a brilliant novel one November and then spend three or four years tacking a manifesto onto the back of it, because, hey, not everyone is so well-read that they understand allegory and symbolism and all that. They're writing to the masses, after all, who they ultimately don't seem to think that highly of. Intiman wrote this script themselves after they lost the rights to the one they originally planned to use, and they did a fantastic job staying true to the text. And that's a good thing for the first two acts. You'll live through the third.

The run has been extended through November 19th, but they can't go any longer than that so there's not a lot of room for "maybe I'll check tickets again in a week if I can't find anything else to do." It's kind of an expensive ticket, but worth it.