NEW YORK — “The playwright Samm-Art Williams passed away recently,” the sonorous sound designer Justin Ellington says in a recorded announcement before director Kenny Leon’s new production of “Home” on Broadway. “Peacefully, at the age of 78.”
I suspect Leon, now Broadway’s most essential director and the best in the business when it comes to honoring Black writers who never got their just deserts, chose the word “peacefully” for that announcement with care. It stays in your mind for the next 90 minutes.
For “Home,” a lovely and richly poetic play written in 1979 and that first made a big impression on me a year or so later, is very much a work about the search for personal peace and the time of life when travel and stress and striving no longer appeal and youthful memories start to exert a new forcefulness. It’s about the time when people often find they just want to go home, only to find that home as they understood it is gone forever.
“Home,” a play that should be much better known, is a small work about an ordinary, rural man’s struggles in an unforgiving and often inhuman world, but is also a simple, sweet drama about the pull of the land and an old sweetheart.
As such, it now sticks out in our tumultuous, tribally divided world as something from a very different time, even though it really doesn’t seem that long ago to me.
The central character of “Home” is Cephus Miles (Tory Kittles), a farmer from Cross Roads, North Carolina, a man with calluses on his hands and feet and who, following his opposition to the Vietnam War and the opprobrium that then greets him, makes the journey to the factories and mean streets of the North only to find himself alone and adrift. In some ways, the play is like Georg Büchner’s “Woyzeck” in that it uses the metaphor of a man on a lifelong journey, forever moving on from one place to another, searching, seeking, trying to come home.
Williams has no other named characters, just Woman One (Brittany Inge) and Woman Two (Stori Ayers), who play all of the other figures in his life, male and female. At times, Woman One morphs into Pattie Mae Wells, Cephus’ first girlfriend and a woman who never leaves either his sensual dreams or his everyday consciousness.
Cephus suffers from the racism of the middle decades of the 20th century, but “Home” does not dwell that much on the battles of the time, notwithstanding the character’s objections to Vietnam. Rather, it imprints a wholly uncommon hopefulness on the era, celebrating its integrative accomplishments, even in the South, more than its divisions. And at the center of it all is this ordinary Black man, suffering but dignified, imperfect but empathetic.
Leon directs the piece for the Roundabout Theatre Company quite beautifully, expanding out Cephus’ world like a concertina on Amulfo Maldonado’s set, dominated by agrarian crops and the other nomenclature of the rural South in the late 1950s. Kittles’ superb performance ranges deep and wide and it comes with an intensity that has stuck with me these last couple of days, locking in as it does on why this man, like so many others in his situation, has a palpable magnitude. Both Inge and Ayers are excellent, too, rolling Williams’ poetry off their tongues and grabbing hold of the emotional resonance that Leon clearly wanted here.
No doubt some will call “Home” sentimental or romantic or overly inclined to see America through a soft gauze. All fair criticisms, I guess. But I see this show as a celebration of the Black farmer, the rural life, the pull of the land, the notion that you should always keep hold of your beginnings. What Cephus gets at the end is not afforded to most of us but as you watch him get it in this production, you sit forward in your seat and think, well, what dramatic character of your acquaintance ever was more deserving?
Which brings me back to the playwright’s death, just last month, long after this show was announced.
Peacefully, we’ve been told.
Inevitably, especially on this occasion, we see the writer in this character whom he has charted across some fervent years, and we’re glad to know that was how he went to meet his maker.
“Home” is opening at a chaotic time of year, filled with Tony Award parties and costly competitions for attention. I hope this unpretentiously and gently staged story of Cephus’ quest doesn’t get lost in the noise; it’s emblematic of what so many of us seek from time at the theater.
By Roundabout Theatre Company at the Todd Haimes Theater, 227 W. 42nd St., New York; www.roundabouttheatre.org
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
