Naomi Wallace’s strong writing and the Signature Theater’s fine cast can’t overcome this story’s schematic fatalism

Be so kind as to hand me the straight razor. And I And Silence, a new, politically potent historical drama from Naomi Wallace, deals with the casually racist and purposely cruel conditions for female prison inmates in the 1950s. It’s a strong piece of writing from this season’s playwright in residence at Signature, sensitively mounted and really well acted. But the unrelenting fatalism drives the lyrical expression, reducing the two characters to helpless victims, puppets dancing to a preordained destiny. Jamie (Trae Harris, an enchanting young performer in her Off Broadway debut) and Dee (Emily Skeggs, chalking up a good one for her resume) are teenagers when we meet them in Jamie’s cell in some unidentified prison in an undisclosed (but vaguely Southern) American city in 1950. Young Jamie is black and Young Dee is white, so it takes courage as well as ingenuity for the uneducated and dim-witted Dee to keep sneaking over from the “white wing” in her campaign to make friends with smart and feisty Jamie. Scribe Wallace, a MacArthur Fellow whose several prize-winning plays include One Flea Spare, writes tough plays, but in a lyrical tongue that hints of her native Kentucky. Although she has a showier rep in the UK than she has here, she gets a really fine production from the locals.