A play about gentrification accidentally proves downtown Phoenix hasn't lost its soul

KJZZ contributor Robrt Pela headed to Space 55 Theatre last weekend, to look at a play about, among other things, the gentrification of downtown Phoenix. He’s got some thoughts.

"Peppermint Beehive" continues through May 31 at Metropolitan Arts Institute.

ROBRT PELA: Last weekend, I attended a play in a downtown basement theater — a play called "Peppermint Beehive" that was about, in part, the gentrification of downtown Phoenix. After what felt like a very long while, it occurred to me that the play was itself a kind of gentrification. Not the glossy, mixed‑use, rooftop‑pool kind, but the other kind, where something earnest and handmade gets bulldozed by people who don’t understand the neighborhood they’re trying to “improve.” In this case, the neighborhood was storytelling.

The story in question follows a young woman who’s unhappy in her corporate job, hates her apartment, and is looking for romance. She meets someone with a tall, red updo who hangs out among the creatives and the unhoused in a downtown Phoenix artist enclave, and they fall for one another.

By the way, this isn’t a theater review. I left the play at intermission, so I can’t tell you what I thought of the acting or the writing or the set design. That’s against the rules of theater criticism. I’m here to talk about the strange sensation of watching a piece of art attempt to indict a city for losing its soul.

I’ve had a few days to think about this, and I’ve decided that "Peppermint Beehive," written by Ashley Naftule and presented by Space 55 Theatre, was deliberately meandering and vulgar, just like both gentrification itself and, sometimes, our response to it. Naftule’s genius was in forcing a couple dozen people — one of whom fell asleep during the first 10 minutes — to endure something as painful as watching the gritty artistic underbelly of a city get beaten to a pulp. This was, I’ve decided, irony as low art with a purpose. Brilliant.

Kristy Velesko

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Handout

The play had a lot to say about a lot of different things besides gentrification, including romance in the 21st century and the evils of corporate America. Its gentrification storyline was clearly a commentary on Roosevelt Row, the artist community that once was. Many of us have watched Roosevelt Row go from a scrappy, paint‑splattered strip of studios and pop‑up galleries to a corridor of luxury apartments with names that sound like antidepressants. We’ve watched artists get priced out of buildings they themselves made interesting, and developers talk about “activating” neighborhoods that were already plenty activated before they showed up with their renderings and their artisanal concrete.

Public commentary on gentrification — including some of my own — is often handled with the subtlety of a zoning‑board meeting. And this play, bless its heart, is no exception. Its villains are corporate-world monsters who speak in slogans; its heroes are artists who appear to have no interior lives. Everyone is a symbol. "This is how we see the people behind gentrification," I thought, as I watched a giant bird-shaped pillow squawk about the importance of downtown art galleries. No one is a person.

Especially not the puppets. Did I mention that there are puppets in this play? I think you should go see "Peppermint Beehive" if only so that you can lie on your deathbed one day, thinking, “Well, at least I got to see a paper mache teapot complain about urban renewal.”

But again, this isn’t a review.

What struck me, sitting there in the dark, was how the play managed to mirror the very thing it was trying to condemn. Just as gentrification can flatten the texture of a city, this nearly-three-hour-long two-act deliberately told a morality tale that was complicated and hard to watch, just like witnessing our own downtown get flattened! Bull’s eye!

Kristy Velesko

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Handout

As I sat there, politely waiting for a policeman puppet to remember its next line, I kept thinking about how the real soul of the city was outside. There, in the alley behind the theater, someone had tagged a wall with a message that was, like the play I was watching, both profane and oddly poetic. I thought about the taco truck parked up the street, where the line for empanadas held more people than the playhouse. I thought about the old brick building across the street that will probably be gone in a year, replaced by something with a rooftop dog park.

Meanwhile, here before me was a play that wanted to warn us about what we’re losing. And if the play was big and messy and full of well-intentioned actors trying to tell a complicated story, wasn’t that also the story of downtown gentrification?

And so I’ve decided that everything about "Peppermint Beehive" was deliberate. I believe that director Dennis Frederick instructed his cast to stare at one another for long minutes, speechless as if they couldn’t recall their next line of dialogue. That he’d told the puppet master to construct lifeless objects to tell parts of the story, and the puppeteers to forget to move the mouths of the puppets while they were speaking.

These storytellers were, I became convinced, bearing witness to the catastrophe of a city that’s messy and alive and, for now at least, still telling its own story.

I crawled out of the theater basement into the warm night, grateful to be back in the real downtown Phoenix, the one that doesn’t need a play to explain it. The one that for decades had been home to big, out-there, amateur creations like the one I’d just seen. Maybe, I thought as I headed toward home, downtown Phoenix is still here.

Kristy Velesko

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay has been modified to remove incorrect descriptions of the materials used in two of the puppets created by Amy Carpenter for “Peppermint Beehive.”

The banana puppet is sculpted out of closed-cell foam, and covered in hand-dyed fabric, and is wired with 3 separately-operated lighting circuits.

The policeman puppet is a paper mache head, a body sewed out of cotton, and 3D printed hand painted hands and boots.