Lolita Marie and Sadeeq Heard (C. Stanley Photography/Theater Alliance)

By DCist contributor Seth Rose

How do we remember the lives of those who, in death, become hashtags? Theater Alliance’s remount of Kimber Lee’s brownsville song (b-side for tray) tackles this question and, though it stumbles a bit in the telling, its answer is ultimately worth listening to.

Set in Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood, the play opens with Lena (Lolita Marie), whose teenage grandson Tray (Sideeq Heard) was recently murdered. She laments in devastatingly lyrical terms that the story should not start with her. From her first line, she establishes a magnetic presence that carries the rest of the show.

Lena has the wisdom you would expect from a grandmother raising two children alone in the heart of Brooklyn. Marie’s stubborn, warmhearted, and often hilarious performance comes through as the highlight of the show, which is directed and choreographed by Paige Hernandez.

The focus shifts to the recent past, when Tray was enthusiastically training for a boxing tournament and not-so-enthusiastically applying for scholarships. These aren’t exciting scenes, but the focus on relatively mundane family drama supports Lena’s emphasis that Tray was a smart and dedicated boy who never ran with gangs or messed with drugs, and that his death (which is never depicted) was the result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The play impresses on us that not everyone who falls victim to urban violence has anything to do with it, which makes it feel more honest than a mere cautionary tale of a good kid gone bad. Unfortunately, the presentation gets muddled in other areas. Lena opens the play on a stirring note that is abruptly dropped. Short music and dance interludes interrupt the action, but feel insubstantial. Nothing derails the main story, but you get the impression of a show that doesn’t always know what it wants to be.

For most of the show, we see Tray trying to express himself in his college scholarship essay. It’s a clever framing device that takes on a greater significance when it circles back to question: how can we see the worth of an entire life in a snapshot? What can you say about a boy who died? brownsville doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, but the life of Tray suggests one.

brownsville (b-side for tray) runs through October 9 at Theater Alliance, 2020 Shannon Place SE. Buy tickets here.