Tree
The future of humanity is mixed-race people, trust it. It can’t be helped since the only race that actually counts is the Human Race itself. And the quicker we get over our superficial evaluations of each other, especially those connected to skin color and nose-size, the better off we will be.
That said, for today race is still problematic. So, let’s posit the situation playwright Julie Hébert gives us. An intelligent Caucasian academic loses her hated father and in the process of cleaning out his house, finds love-letters from forty-some years before to a young African-American woman she has never know about. And, furthermore, when she descends on the house of this woman and her male offspring of this doomed relationship and further discovers her dad had actually married this woman, our academic has to deal with the fact that she is illegitimate since the first wedding was never legally ended. Whew! There’s a plot to rival the brilliant one in AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY.
In an extraordinary production at Hollywood’s [Inside] The Ford Theatre, on Highland Avenue, opposite the Hollywood Bowl, director Jessica Kubzansky radiantly illustrates the characters’ dilemma, casting some astonishing actors as part of her strategy.
Jacqueline Wright is Didi, a professor of Women’s Studies, a strong-willed intellectual who wears her anger at life – and her father – in plain sight. Her interactions with her half-brother, Leo (Chuma Gault), are tense and fraught with possible violence. Leo’s mother, the woman who married Didi’s father while he was in the Army, Jessalyn (Sloan Robinson), has tragically entered the Alzheimer’s Roundtable, but she reenacts much of her relationship with Didi’s dad through her letters to and from him. Leo’s daughter, JJ. (Tessa Thompson), being young, is more willing than her father and grandmother to explore this unknown and strikingly-odd new family dynamic.
Great, or even good, acting can only happen when text, director and cast are on in even-sync with each other. And here this melding of talents is eye-opening and deeply felt by we folk watching deeply wrenching situations. It ends up being a marvelous gift to us all. The quartet of actors is blessed with astonishing acting-talent, looks, and the ability to listen, relatively rare in today’s theatre. Wright, Gault, Robinson and Thompson should be better known to all of us.
In support of the above are the technical elements: the scenic and lighting design of Brian Sidney Bembridge, the costume design of Leah Piehl and the music and sound design of Bruno Louchouarn. Each part contributes to the whole, and when you add in the astonishing direction by Kubzansky, it means we all must thank producers Laura Jane Slavato and Isabel Storey for bringing it all together.
Thanks, indeed.