By: Janet Preus
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Eric Avery and David Eulus Wiles in the Blue Door. Promotional photo by by George Byron Griffiths
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One has to applaud the subject matter, and you don’t need to be a black man to appreciate the necessity of coming to terms with your history – or your own past, or your bad choices, or a personal humiliation. Pain is pain. If I am to be touched by the horror and pathos that is Lewis’s heritage, I have to attach it to the closest thing in my own understanding, which doesn’t come remotely close to his story, but there it is: the challenge of art.
The challenge of this performance was to actually deliver on the premise that it is, as the playwright describes it, “one man’s insomniatic journey through the dark night of his soul,” and address the question, as she puts it, “Is my present determined by my familial past?”
Just two actors cover the terrain.
The Simon/Rex/Jesse character is a role rich in its language, complexity and history, played with wonderful versatility by Eric Avery. When I could hear him. Yes, folks, a professional actor – no, two of them, worked in earnest to delve into the complicated interior of the black man’s soul, but failed to project and articulate adequately to be always heard and understood. Let me point out that I have no hearing loss, but this issue was constantly pulling me out of the story when I wanted so desperately to be pulled in.
Given this, I will try to fairly address the premise: Lewis, a successful math professor, has not come to terms with his slave heritage, his father’s drinking and abuse, his brother’s drug use and death - in short, a wealth of unspeakable tragedy he now wants no part of. The manifestation of this (and catalyst for the plot) is that he refuses to attend the Million Man March, despite his wife’s urging, and she leaves him. Now he is alone with nothing but his past, and all he wants is to be different from it, or “better”, if you will.
Characters from his familial past speak to him.
“It’s time you free yourself, Lewis,” said his brother.
I asked myself, “From what, precisely?” and “why is this so critical?” and (most importantly) “how?”
It’s fine to say what the play is about, but is it?
David Eulus Wiles had the task of balancing the uptight, sort-of-white professor, Lewis, with a black man’s tortured soul. The scales tipped to the professor’s side. If he was indeed so tortured, I should see a man turned inside out – raw, naked, empty. We only got part-way there. Maybe it was the odd cadence of his line delivery, dropping the ends of words and chopping phrases into tiny pieces. I was distracted by his technique instead of being drawn in by it.
The character’s foot-dragging, of course, demanded that Wiles hold something back, but a more powerfully articulated conflict early in the play – the responsibility of the playwright – would have helped. Lewis outrage against a mouthy student was important, for example, but just came too late. His refusal to attend the Million Man March, meant to be symbolic of something larger, seemed instead a flimsy excuse for a thematic catalyst.
However, the storytelling narrative was marvelous, the language succinct, engaging, in a voice clear and colorful. This is where the playwright truly shines. Had Wiles delivered it more like poetry and less like a lecture, it might have created an empathetic glow that could have wrapped up the whole thing in one mighty package – flaws be damned. And that falls squarely at the feet of the director.
Location Info:
Guthrie Theater
Artist Info: Emigrant Theater
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