My Hey Little Walter Review

What can I say about Hey Little Walter? It is simply a must-not-see smash hit on the nose of stupidity! This outrageously melodramatic work gives the audience everything; sex, drugs, and a drive-by shooting. The play is outfitted perfectly to fit the tastes of action-starved viewers practically salivating over a pumped up exaggeration of inner-city life. Playwright and director Carla Debbie Alleyne sure makes it seem easy. But don't be fooled. Even at her ripe old age of 15, it is no easy task to write a miraculously plot-heavy play in a vocabulary just coming short of 50 words. Producer and casting director Holly Jones must have mistaken the try-outs for a Jay-Z video, presenting this hard-core story through pretty boys who struggle with the ebonics and slang. The heavily fogged, red-lit main set, well-armored in chain link fences and brick by set designer Woodrow Reed kept the audience half-expecting to be treated to a less biblical interpretation of "As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death." Perhaps we should give the creators of Hey Little Walter a chance to live out their back street dreams, however I, for one, will not provide the backing.

The play revolves around Walter, a high-school student living with his struggling single mother, brother Albert, and sister Latoya in a dingy apartment on the wrong side of the set budget. Walter's money-grubbing long-time buddy Rakim, Alexander for "Mama's" purposes, lures Walter into the drug-dealing web. Walter, after weighing his heavy concerns about "poisoning" the family with the business or deserting them in death, considers selling only for their economic benefit. Walter is swayed to give in finally by Nicky, a trashy neighborhood girl who ends their passionless, purely physical relationship to loan her body to a rich local dealer for cash and glory. Alas, Walter's younger brother Albert overhears his brother and Rakim planning to hook themselves up with Rakim's cousin's business, and, longing for a ticket to popularity on a pricey pair of Air Jordan's, begins his own cash quest. Pausing only briefly after the murder of Rakim's cousin's and a few close scratches with the cops, the pair climb steadily upwards in the web and set up a permanent counter in a back-alley shop. Walter, dubbed "Little Walter" on the streets, makes a seemingly impossible personality turn-around once his pockets are filled. Devoting all of his treasure to fancy clothing and Nicky's return guarantee, he leaves the loans to Mama, leaves Albert to go to all ends for the sneakers, and Latoya to suddenly become a miraculously all-knowing elementary school kid going on graduate degree in crime detection. In what seems not just a foreshadowing device but a foretelling song, Latoya gives her own rendition of "Hey Little Walter, Something's Going to Get You." Clearly and irrevocably entangled in the drug business and a victim of greed, the story of Walter's poisoned family unravels in this dead-lock grip.

Walter's story just may be too much for a mere hour and a half presentation (and that's counting the oodles of time provided for the smog and rappers to set in). In fact, Walter's story is what you would expect an ill teenager decked out in designer Puff-Daddy pajamas to write on a boring, chick-less Saturday night with a cold and a brain blockade from huge amounts of Sudafed. The audience must allow the playwright irrational jumps in character development and a completely unrealistic sense of the passage of time and the movement of plot due to very dramatic, self-inflicted coughing fits skillfully directed at the master bedroom in the hopes of missing Math class. Even more likely English. The best scene was the opening. After being thoroughly sedated with fumes from set effects, the audience is eagerly saved from never ending choruses of "Little Walter," from the unforgiving rap soundtrack by the appearance of what should be an actor. The opening monologue is the play's most promising moment. The audience, amused slightly by Walter's stereotyped ravings and the introduction of the overtly metaphoric use of chains, has no idea what a wild, poorly acted journey is before them, and for some, even the long trek back to the car at intermission. The literary content brings no relief but the lack of the need for thought process, and no style excepting bad style, only restating the bold events of the simple, over-played plot. The ghetto-illusion scenes and those in which Walter preaches and reacts in a pretentiously wise ghostlike form add only soap-opera emotion and a headache from eye-stressful lighting, chemical smoke, and exposure to the unbearable one-dimensional set and acting. All my sympathy goes out to those who hung in there until the end, and even more so to those who hung onto the edges of their seats, licking their lips for more dirty business.

Hey Little Walter covers all the no-no bases and manages to sizzle and smoke with the stench of sappy, unrealistic sentimentality. It is enough to make you weep from one reason or another, that I guarantee. I can recommend the play to those who don't get out enough, don't get enough, or can't get enough of "The Days of Our Lives." A frontier in audience satisfaction, this will leave teens, preteens and bed-ridden elders full-bellied and very moved. What can I say, Little Walter, you've got me tearing up just thinking about you.