Sean Combs…well, I can’t even with Sean Combs these days. But twenty years ago he helped bring a stunning revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun to Broadway. His performance was nothing special but no one who saw it will ever forget the incandescent, unforgettable portrayals by Phylicia Rashad, Audra McDonald, and Sanaa Lathan. (It was filmed for TV in 2008 and is available on Tubi.) And it marked the Broadway debut of director Kenny Leon, who has proven to be an excellent steward of black-written plays either lost in time or that hadn’t gotten their proper due, like Adrienne Kennedy’s Ohio State Murders and Ossie Davis’ Purlie Victorious, a hit last season and a double Tony nominee for Leon this Sunday. The 2024-2025 season opens with another noteworthy excavation, of Samm-Art Williams’ Home.
Williams’ chamber comedy-drama received Tony and Drama Desk award nominations for best play in 1980 and enjoyed a decent run. The playwright’s colorful life included stints as Muhammad Ali’s sparring partner and as an executive producer on TV’s The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air but this is miles away from such glamor, transpiring as it does on a a rustic, stalk-filled set. With a three-person cast it’s a small, countrified show, which may account for its decades of invisibility, and initially it looks a bit lost at the Todd Haimes. But it has something to say about the crosscurrents of black life in America, then and now, and its poignant insights come to fill the Roundabout venue.
The show is a progression of incidents in the life of one Cephus Miles (Tory Kittles), who is somewhat content to be a tobacco farmer in Cross Roads, North Carolina. It’s the Fifties, and there’s little reason to think that much will change in the land he works with his uncle and grandfather. There is a girl, Pattie Mae Wells (Brittany Inge), but her aspirations post-high school are befuddling to him. More strained is his relationship with God, an exasperation with celestial rules that matches his annoyance with the petty tyrannies of life in the South. A decade later Pattie Mae has gone to the big city and has married, as Cephus is “courted” by the draft board. But Cephus, good with God on one point, refuses to kill. A black conscientious objector, however, is something Vietnam-era society cannot countenance, and branded a draft dodger Cephus is sent to prison. Eventually freed into the harsh confines of the city, where drugs are a constant temptation and poverty is rampant, Cephus returns home, to find the farm gone and his neighbors distant.
This dour plot summary masks what comes around to be a hopeful play, one that ponders the vicissitudes of the Great Migration of African-Americans northwards without didactism. (The “preaching” is more comical in nature.) Much of its appeal comes from how pacily Leon has staged the 90-minute show, with the dozens of characters seamlessly played by Inge and a fellow actress, Stori Ayers, revolving around Kittles’ bedrock presence as Cephus. It moves with a purposeful energy, aided in particular by Arnulfo Maldonado’s set and Allen Lee Hughes’ lighting, both responsive to the shifts in emotional energy. Leon and company do justice to the inequities that Williams was writing about, which still echo, and also to the beauties Cephus uncovers in his eventful journey. Williams, sadly, passed away before the show began previews in May, but a sturdy house has been constructed for his Home.
Comments