Cheryl is the last young woman to whom the LeVay men should be giving any shit. The teenage daughter of the longtime housekeeper at the LeVays’ Martha’s Vineyard cottage, Cheryl is whip-smart, intuitively observant, verbally precocious, and absolutely positively not afraid to speak her mind. And she’s spent her entire life around this family. She knows how to make the sandwich that neurosurgeon Dr. Joseph LeVay (David Emerson Toney) prefers—and knows that what he really wants are the pickled pigs feet. She carries a bit of a torch for the handsome eldest LeVay son, plastic surgeon Flip (Kevin Jiggetts), and bridles a bit when he brings his new lady friend Kimber (Kaytie Morris) to the cottage for the weekend. And Cheryl is especially suspicious of entomologist Taylor (Erika Rose), the fiancee of the youngest LeVay son, Kent (Kevin S. McAllitser), an aspiring novelist. Taylor keeps trying to ingratiate herself with the family, and her constant efforts to make nice with Cheryl just rub the young woman the wrong way. But Cheryl is the help; she’s not there to take part in family discussions, no matter how close she feels to the LeVays. It’s her job to arrive first and prepare the house. She gets asked—and sometimes ordered—to make this drink or prepare that meal. And once all are gathered and drinks are consumed and relationships discussed and current and previous sexual peccadilloes disclosed, Cheryl has endured a soap opera’s worth of melodrama—with the biggest shocker still to come. It’s a very Cheever weekend.

And yet, Lydia R. Diamond’s Stick Fly isn’t the typical family drama as examination of American affluence. For one, the LeVays are African-American, Martha’s Vineyard being one of the first places blacks owned land in the New World. And the house actually belongs to Dr. LeVay’s wife and Flip and Kent’s mother, whose family, the Whitcombs, has been on the island for generations. Dr. LeVay arrives at the house by himself, and though Flip and Kent find that odd, their father assures them their mother is coming, even though he keeps making Cheryl run interference for him when she calls.

The power of Diamond’s play, though, lies in how specifically she realizes the LeVays as an instance of bourgeoisie African-American life, and how universally familiar their intra-family problems are. And what makes it so potent is the adroit way Diamond handles race: It’s an issue that can’t be ignored, but it’s not the deep heart into which Stick Fly plunges. What Diamond fearlessly and quite comically explores is the intersection of class and family frisson, a barbed subject that knows no color line.

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