Proof of Love
By: Chisa Hutchinson / Narrated by: Brenda Pressley
Length: 1 hr and 6 mins
Wow! Heartfelt, disturbing, problematic, lovely
Look, I didn’t read the Publisher’s Summary, none of the extra info on playwright, on actress, none of the reviews, before I went into Proof of Love. So?
Yesssss! THAT’S the way to do it!
First, the listener is introduced to actress Brenda Pressley’s beautiful voice, her emotionally evocative tones. She IS our heroine, middle-aged Constance, sitting at the hospital bedside of her husband, reeling from a nurse’s information that: What Constance THOUGHT happened to her husband? That he’d been off to see his best friend and was in a serious accident, kinda sorta was NOT what had happened.
He’d been in a crash, miles in the other direction of his buddy’s house. And his phone is blowing up with text messages: Someone who’s demanding to know where he is. Someone who will tell his wife what he’s reeeeally been up to for the last 8-years. This comatose man, this nearly brain-dead man, still has a fingerprint that can be used to unlock his phone, open his text messages.
And a new and frightening world opens to Constance as she comes to see that the man she never ever would’ve dreamed could be unfaithful, has indeed been that. For 8-years, and now his low-class (Problematic for me…) girlfriend is texting that it’s time for him to choose, that she’s not happy with having only part of a man’s life, no longer happy with a once-a-week visit.
Now all of this is very very heartfelt as Constance looks into her memories, as she dives into her prejudices, the prejudices within the Black community, of judging others by the manner in which they speak. Of the way they pronounce words (She really goes to town on Black people saying Aks rather than Ask. It’s enough for her to correct her daughter’s best friend; it’s enough for her to acknowledge that she probably, most DEFinitely! wouldn’t have given her husband a second thought had he said Aks at any point during their courtship). She suddenly worries that p’raps, during their 30+ years together, she’s inadvertently looked down on him, this self-made man who worked himself out of poverty and into tasteful bespoke suits.
And she understands why her grown daughter looks down upon HER—she, after all, is carrying prejudices against her own people. Her daughter is staunchly proud of dad, of the way he worked for his success.
Further? Obviously her husband felt a measure of safety with this Other Woman who is of his same class. The problem? Okay, well, that playwright Chisa Hutchinson has written, that actress Pressley conveys, a low-class and poorly-bred woman. You want Low-Speak? Listen to Pressley as she does a caricature of an uneducated Black woman, all screechy and ignorant tones. The only thing that saved this for me, cuz man! I did the white Liberal thing of becoming offended for someone who is patently not m’self, was that, as our loyal wife reads the diatribe/letter the Other Ill-Educated Woman was set to send her, that screechiness mellowed into Constance’s own voice, that she p’raps began seeing the heart of a class of woman who, no she didn’t have the same golden upbringing or education, spoke Truth, spoke of Warmth.
Last problem? Okay, there are actually two: Why on EARTH do we have to have a woman, ostensibly our heroine, come to the conclusion that she is p’raps the cause of her husband’s infidelity? That p’raps it was her prejudices that sent him to find safety in the arms and between the legs of another woman (Too crude? Well, I guess I’m just a trifle peeeeved with that bit o’ crafting…).
-And- NOW Last Thing: Suuuuuch an abrupt ending, not so much loose ends left as it was that one is, quite simply, left HANGING, nothing definitive, no decisions made, just a sense of guilt and sorrow.
So? This definitely tugged at m’ heartstrings cuz I’m easy like that: Hutchinson had me at cheating husband in a coma/grieving wife sitting at the bedside. And I truly appreciated the well-crafted collision of two worlds, the battle for honesty and authenticity. I just coulda done without the portrayal of a screechy dumb and low-class Black woman who suddenly, when all was said and done, becomes Madonna-like in her wisdom.
Aaaaallll that said, dude! this is only baaaarely over a single hour in length. It’s well-written; it’s wonderfully acted; it has a lot of heart; it’s emotional, and it packs a bit of a wallop.
And good golly gosh?
It was freeeeeee!!!
Free listening for Audible Members.
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