Near the beginning of Marcus Gardley's new play "... and Jesus moonwalks the Mississippi," set in the Civil War South, one Creole character raises a toast "to la fraternite, l'egalite, and to l'amour."
It's a key moment. The line twists the three tenets of the French Revolution - liberty, equality and fraternity - into "fraternity, equality and love," a fitting substitution in a work that's all about the place in which love and liberty intersect. "Jesus," which opened on Thursday in a compelling Sock and Buskin production, shows how love can be both a kind of freedom and, at the same time, a kind of enslavement.
Gardley's lyrical play, loosely based on the classical myth of Persephone, opens with a chilling act of violence - the onstage lynching of Damascus (Mark Brown '09), who is a runaway slave searching for his lost daughter, Po'em, in 1865. Somehow, Damascus survives - or perhaps he dies and is reborn. "Jesus" operates through its own surrealistic logic and embraces ambiguity at the expense of simple narrative clarity. In any case, Damascus returns, dressed as a woman and bearing a new name, Demeter, but still just as determined to find Po'em.
The bold choice by director Patricia Ybarra, assistant professor of theatre, speech and dance, to have Demeter played by a man - a possibility suggested, but not required, by the script - could easily have devolved into a campy, two-hour-long wink were it not for Brown and Ybarra's careful sculpting of this complex character. In fact, Brown's self-effacing performance is so thoroughly convincing that the audience simply forgets that the woman onstage is actually a man, except in those few moments when Gardley's script intentionally points to this dissonance.
Demeter invades the Louisiana home of Cadence Verse, played by Alicia Coneys '09 as an aging Southern belle who lives in boozy memories of a "Gone with the Wind"-style antebellum South. Cadence, who can hardly take care of herself, also has two children to raise on her own: her white, tomboyish daughter Blanche, played by Samantha Ressler '09 and Alfreeda (Lauren Neal '11), also called Free, a half-black, half-white girl whose origins are, at first, a mystery.
Demeter's unexpected arrival disrupts the Verse family's bayou paralysis and teaches the women how to be self-sufficient. But when Demeter starts asking uncomfortable questions about Free's roots, the family's old, hidden scars are torn open.
In a parallel narrative set two years earlier, during the 1863 Siege of Vicksburg, Cadence's husband Jean, played by Federico Rodriguez '09, is also searching desperately for Po'em. He soon finds himself in an unlikely partnership with Yankee Pot Roast, a bugler in the Union army, played by Lucian Cohen '09. The 1863 and 1865 stories weave into and out of each other until they finally collide in the play's chaotic climax.
Erin Adams '09, as Mississippi, movingly captures the river's tortured soul in her role as a constant presence and commentator on the play's action. Clarence Demesier '11 takes on the role of Jesus, who is visible only to Free. Demesier, seemingly undaunted by this formidable part, delivers Jesus' impassioned monologues as well as his naively comic moments with impressive command.
Leading a talk-back after Thursday's performance, Professor of Africana Studies James Campbell, chair of the University's Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, pointed to the play's daring in addressing the topic of slavery by mixing together a range of emotional responses, from artificial, "Gone with the Wind" idealization to rage and bitterness. He connected this approach to a larger trend of more nuanced understandings of slavery's legacy in the United States. In his comments, he highlighted the play's insistence on the confusion of seemingly intractable borders between master and slave, male and female and white and black.
Gardley's thickly poetic language is itself a kind of composite, deriving its excitement from the intermingling of the earthy and the sublime. But lyricism can only go so far in masking weaknesses in plot. The 1863 narrative, despite Cohen and Rodriguez's committed, exciting acting, is underdeveloped, and several of its scenes ring false.
It often feels as though Gardley works too hard to mold necessary backstory into unnecessarily hectic theater, and all of those double-crossings and plot reversals eventually grow tedious. Demeter's story, however, has enough stately simplicity and emotional power for two plays, and the warmth and cunning humor of her interactions with the Verse women are a lesson both in virtuoso acting and powerfully understated drama.
"Jesus" runs through April 20 at Leeds Theater. On Friday, April 18, Daphne Brooks, associate professor of English and African-American studies at Princeton University, will lead a talk-back.
