'Gospel According to James' at Victory Gardens: Racial violence won't stay quietly in the past
THEATER REVIEW: "The Gospel According to James" ★★★ Through June 12 at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln Ave.; Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes; Tickets: $20-$50 at 773-871-3000 and victorygardens.org. With Andre De Shields and Linda Kimbrough.
As America has finally come to confront its racist past, many of its darkest moments of social unrest have become the subject of investigations and narrative reconstructions. But time and again — I'm thinking here about the abduction and killing of Emmett Till in Money, Miss., in 1955 or the murders of the civil rights workers near Philadelphia, Miss., in 1964 or any number of other shadowy crimes where people still hide in the shadows, making claims and counterclaims — whatever truth and reconciliation that might flow from a full accounting has been hampered by the limits of memory and the perpetuation of personal agendas.
Many of these atrocities took place in backwaters, where the races intermingled, especially the young. And yet history shows us that the fruits of limited education and opportunities, and sometimes common economic deprivation, exploded in anger and hurt. And so as documentarians, investigators, filmmakers and journalists have tried to find out the truth about myriad unsolved hate crimes from the early and mid-20th century, different, aging people have told their different, aging stories from different, ever-young points of view. In some cases the full truth — the convictable truth — has proved as elusive now as then.
That is the backdrop to “The Gospel According to James,” Charles Smith's ambitious, dramatic and thoughtful meditation on a doubling lynching that took place in 1930 in Marion, Ind.
When the idea of dramatizing one of the most horrific nights in Hoosier history was put to Smith by the Indiana Repertory Theatre, where this commissioned play was first staged under the direction of Chuck Smith (no relation) before moving to the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater (it opened Wednesday), the playwright doubtless pondered pitfalls and the point of such an enterprise. Would not restaging the lynching merely arouse hurt and best-buried memories? Or could such a play provide healing? And how could it offer complexity and yet also tell of an event where right and wrong are as clear as the images on the faces burned into the infamous photo of the hangers and the hanged? Or so you would think.
Charles Smith, an astute, ambitious and gutsy writer whose work I've admired for years, ended up writing not just about the context of the event itself, but about competing memories of what actually happened and the reasons for those disparities. He deliberately scrambles where you think praise and blame will lie and he focuses on an imagined meeting, more than half-a-century after the lynching, between James Cameron (Andre De Shields), once a young and immature kid in Marion, a kid (Anthony Peeples) who barely escaped with his life; and Marie (Linda Kimbrough, doing some of the best and most acerbic acting work of her illustrious career), once a young, fast-living white girl (the wholly authentic Kelsey Brennan) who was romantically embroiled with Abe Smith (Tyler Jacob Rollinson), a young black fellow with ambition that made whites uncomfortable.
James, whose complexity De Shields deftly captures, wants to keep talking to any and all cameras, and even wants to build a museum on the sight of the horrors. Marie would rather bury the past. As the play unfolds, we come to see that both have their good reasons.
Smith, the playwright, overreaches when it comes to imparting broader meanings — the last few minutes are filled with excessive talk of the weight and symbols of different stories, when the actual events that Smith recounts in gripping fashion have actually already made that point dramatically, as it should be made. We're able to make the leap without being told. Especially since Chuck Smith's intense production features some blistering acting in the inner play, especially from Diane Kondrat and Christopher Jon Martin, who play a working-class white couple whose lives collapse as hate and fear ascend and whose motivations and actions are consistently surprising.
That level of surprise is no mean feat in such a play that many will think, wrongly, will be formulated as a kind of painful moral medicine. Actually, Charles Smith keeps you wholly on your toes. Both the script and the production sometimes stutter when one world blends into another — both are caught at times, I think, between realistic dramatic history and the unease of the play with that very thing, and are not always wholly sure how to make that link. At times, you wish the style of the show had taken some of the same risks you can see in the script.
But when we're back in Marion in 1930 — whichever memory of that time and place — we feel its passions and fear the licks of its flame. And, more importantly, we quickly grasp that the fire will burn for decades until no one fully knows how to put it out.
Comments