Web MasterThe Washington University Performing Arts Department production of The Darker Face of the Earth takes on the Oedipus Rex and does so beautifully. The play bringing Rita Dove’s poetry and painful drama to life through the struggles of blacks and whites on a South Carolina plantation during the slave years.
Darker Face is a deceptively simple tale based on the Oedipus theme. Amalia Jennings LaFarge, the plantation owner’s wife, has an affair with a slave, Hector, producing a bastard son who Louis LaFarge wants dead.
Instead, the doctor takes him away to a family who raises their slaves from birth, and twenty years later, Amalia purchases Augustus Newcastle, a slave she does not recognize to be her own son-that is, until it’s too late.
Seems pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? However, things are not so cut-and-dry. Unlike in Oedipus, in Darker Face the oracle Scylla prophecies a revolution led by Newcastle to take control of the plantation. The outcome of the Oedipus myth is well known, but in Dove’s version, one wonders whether Newcastle will carry out the revolutionaries’ plans and kill his lover Amalia, or whether he can save the plantation and risk his own death.
The vast conflict, therefore, requires excellent actors, and this production gets them with stunning results. Bevin Ross performs the role of Amalia with both tender affection and sly cunning, as she attempts to love and tame the slave who challenges her mind and heart.
Candice Jones also does a striking job as Scylla, the frightening and perpetually hunched voodoo practitioner who predicts Augustus’s eventual demise. Jones invests a lot in the role, and the audience is richly rewarded with a sense of fright and curiosity about the mysterious prophet.
The ensemble work in the production is well choreographed and rendered exquisitely by Andrea Urice’s direction. The slaves establish a camaraderie that is both touching and highly believable. Miles Grier as Augustus Newcastle is particularly outstanding. The change in Grier’s manner from scene to scene is seamless. Whether passing the day with the other slaves, having a heated conversation with Phebe (played by Willayna Kristen Roberts), or boldly sweeping Amalia off her feet, Grier never loses his intensity.
The overall power of the cast is impressive, with only a few opening night line flubs. The one thing that needs improvement was the number of males in the ensemble cast-one or two more would have better balanced the spiritual singing.
Besides the excellent acting, Emmanuel Gaillot’s sound design helps to shape the play aurally. The lack of pre-show music is disconcerting at first, but when the lights go down and the African drums begin, the transition is all the more powerful. The drumming provides a pulse to the play, at times slow and comfortable and scarily loud and fast during periods of high drama. Meanwhile, spirituals such as “Freedom Train” and “Balm of Gilead” serve as both foreground and background music during the play, and both work seamlessly.
The most chilling and heartbreaking moment in the play, however, comes during “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” sung in darkness by Grier and the Narrator (performed by Adeola Ogumwole). The song conveys the loneliness felt by the play’s characters.
With an excellent set, designed by PAD artist-in-residence Chris Pickart, and lighting designed by Rick Kuykendall, The Darker Face of the Earth is an unhappy tale, but one that is so mesmerizing in its execution that it will leave the audience satisfied.