Hustling the American Dream on Gritty Streets
by Bruce Webber

Photo provided by Richard Termine for The New York Times Ray Thomas, left, and David Shawin "Corner Wars," about the violent lives of young drug dealers on the streets of Philadelphia.

"Corner Wars," an urban drama conceived, written and performed with the earnestness and energy of the young, tells an ostensibly representative story about the street-level drug trade in Philadelphia. The content of the script, written by Tim Dowlin, is pretty familiar from television cop shows and movies about gangs, complete with a tragic conclusion involving teenagers with guns. And it takes the sympathetic, admonitory tone of an after-school special toward the excitable tough-talkers whose criminality is as culturally inevitable as, say, surfing is to the beachniks of Malibu.

But the show, which is being presented at the 47th Street Theater by the aptly named Theater for a New Generation, does have an originality about it that is worth encouraging. Its depiction of street-corner culture, a strain of hip-hop that is fueled by testosterone competition, feels authentic and new to the stage.
So does the spoken language. This is the first drama I've seen that has been written entirely in the rap patois that helps define the defiant alienation of the young and deprived — a profanity-laced, reductive but colorful argot delivered with an incantatory lilt. The dialogue is off-putting, but its use represents a significant experiment; perhaps one reason this very American dialect hasn't taken its place on the stage is that it is a language that, in the real world, serves to distance its natural speakers from those who generally go to the theater. So whatever the other strengths and weaknesses of "Corner Wars," it has a welcome sociological element.

The main characters in "Corner Wars," members of a street gang who operate an open-air market for marijuana and crack cocaine, are presented not as outlaws so much as enterprising young men and women behaving according to local custom.

They don't use drugs themselves, and they have ambitions that go beyond their low-level criminal life. One man, who idolizes his older brother who has just gotten out of prison, is studying for his high-school equivalency exam. He is perpetually testing himself with spelling words from the newspaper, and he has been inspired by his experience keeping track of the gang's drug profits to dream of studying accounting. One woman joins the gang to keep herself afloat while she is waiting for someone to sign her to a record deal. One thinks of himself as a renegade artist; in fact, his devotion to his public spray-painting gets in the way of his gang responsibilities.

Nonetheless, they are rather ruthless in exploiting the addictions of their friends and neighbors — they don't mind trading their wares for the sexual favors of a sweet-tempered, pathetically hooked girl — and when a rival gang introduces heroin to the market and begins crowding their territory, the eruption of tragic violence is inevitable.

Let's be clear. Mr. Dowlin's writing is wildly uneven. He hears the street lingo like a native speaker, and his storytelling is thorough; there are real themes in the script of "Corner Wars"; there is real social commentary; and there are no loose ends. There is an admirable playwright's instinct at work in the monologue that opens the second act, a direct address to the audience by a former schoolteacher who explains his fall from grace to what he has become, a trembling, homeless addict. But to judge from many of the cliché-ridden episodes that Mr. Dowlin has written into his play, it would behoove him to watch a little less television and read a little more.

It is also the case that the cast members are largely inexperienced, and some of the acting is wince-inducing. But the show manages to stick with you anyway; there is something real in its sound and sense. The director, Mel Williams, deserves credit for recognizing what is original in "Corner Wars" and underscoring it; he has turned a community-center-level project into a legitimate theatrical report from a new but not-so-distant quarter.