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Last Updated: Jun 9th, 2009 - 12:51:45 |
A man tosses and turns in his dreary bed in the opening scene of Tanya Barfield’s new play “Blue Door” at the Atlas Performing Arts Center in Washington, D.C. Lewis, a Black, middle-aged math professor, can’t sleep; he is tormented by the dull ache of loneliness, regret and self-loathing. Before dawn breaks, he will become the student of ancestral ghosts and his dead brother who try to teach him the costs of forgetting the not-too-distant past.
Lewis’ Anglo wife has left him because of his lack of self-awareness—he arrogantly blows her off when she suggests he go to the Million Man March. After he berates one of his students by hurling a racial epithet at him, the college forces the stuffy Lewis (James Foster, Jr.)to take a sabbatical.
As he sits on the bed in his pajamas, his frowning mouth defensively railing about the recent downturns in his life, you want him to just shut up. Lewis is a one-dimensional character, his negativity fills the theater, and his energy is draining. The pace of the play early on is rather slow.
Then the ghost of Black revolutionaries past—his dead younger brother Rex (Derrick LeMont Sanders)—shows up, dressed in the Black Panther uniform: the cool beret tilted to the left, the black leather jacket, and the gloved fist, always ready for the power salute. Sanders is fresh and engaging, and as Rex he gives the play a boost and a jolt of much needed energy.
Rex, the uneducated brother who got into trouble, calls Lewis out for being unconscious about his blackness. Lewis pushes back, arguing that education and achievement are the tools Black folks need to cultivate to wash off the taint of ghetto life.
To make a point, Barfield draws a family tree going back four generations, and Rex becomes Jesse, a son of slaves born in 1865. Talking as a child, Jesse—Lewis and Rex’s grandfather—recalls the day “the six ghosts” in the white sheets and hoods came to threaten his father Simon to keep him from voting. In an attempt to create a sense of well-being and protection, Simon tells the boy to find a brush, and paint the front door blue “to keep the bad spirits out, and the good spirits in.”
Jesse tells the tales of the brutality and hardships faced by black people in the post-Civil War South. The dead storytellers go back and forth. At one point Simon the great-grandfather is speaking, and then Rex tells Jesse about the horrifying experience their father Charles had as a boy when he saw a photo of his father’s mutilated body being sold as a postcard in a local shop.
Barfield’s story about the pain inflicted on Black men by forces outside and passed down to generations in the form of violence within the family is often poetic, but the audience has to pay attention to keep track of which of Lewis’ ancestors is speaking. The actor Sanders (Simon, Jesse, Rex) does a good job of keeping the thread together and providing a differentiation between his characters; still, at times it’s hard to know which decade or century you’re in.
Before the play ends, several doors get a coat of blue paint. It appears that Barfield’s words to the wise are these: as a person of color, you better learn your history, and appreciate where you came from if you want to keep from living the never-ending nightmare of a shallow, joyless life.
The African Continuum Theatre Company’s production of “Blue Door” continues through May 3 at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H. Street NE, Washington DC, (202) 399-7993.
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