nothin Womanhood, Or Something Like It | New Haven Independent

Womanhood, Or Something Like It

Elli Green Phoros

Kevin Hourigan, Courtney Jamison, Jakeem Powell, Moses Ingram, Erron Crawford, and Amandla Jahava.

From almost the very beginning of In The Red and Brown Water, which plays at the Yale Cabaret from Thursday through Saturday night, our protagonist Oya is running.

Locomotive arms lift and lower themselves behind her. Feet become percussive instruments, hammering into the stage. From all sides of her body comes a deep, collective breath, actors throwing themselves into movement as if to will her forward. It’s the only consistency of which she is totally sure as her muscled legs fly, trying to transport her to another life.

But in this world, a blend of myth and mortality from its beginning to its end, it’s never completely clear what she is running toward, and what she is running from. Instead, she (and by extension, the play) explores, in luminous and intricate detail, what it means to be on the edge of womanhood — and specifically, black womanhood — falling in and out of faith with oneself until there is little self left to fall into.

Kevin Hourigan and Moses Ingram, with the company.

Written by Tarell Alvin McCraney in 2010 as part of his The Brother/Sister Plays trilogy, the play takes place somewhere on the Gulf Coast, against a backdrop of subsidized housing projects and the families, mostly single-parent households, trying to live undramatically in them. They are introduced in narrative chunks: playful Elegba, always in search of something to sate him; sweet Ogun and smoldering boyhood antagonist Shongo; formidable Mamma Moja, too much fire for the world to handle at once; Aunt Elegua, who always has her nose in somebody else’s business. And Oya, a promising young runner who is dealt a series of blows, one after the other after the other.

This framework has magic in it yet. Like The Brothers Size, which left an indelible impact on the Yale Cabaret in 2014, In The Red and Brown Water embeds in its characters orishas — spiritual representations of the children of divine creator Olorun in Yoruba mythology. Orbiting each other with a fluid, slightly self-conscious narrative style — stage directions are spoken aloud, casting a sort of spell on the show — characters evolve and evolve again, stepping into their orishas until they are fully integrated, and their divinity has come to define their everyday existence.

Moses Ingram and Jonathan Higgenbotham

Directed by Tori Sampson, the Cabaret’s performance — the first of the 2017 season — is particularly powerful. That’s owing in part, she said at a talkback Thursday night, to her great respect for McCraney, who will head the Yale School of Drama’s playwriting program this year. His work has helped her form a foundation for her own, and she read In The Red and Brown Water around 30 times before jumping on with Leland Fowler to direct it.

The intimacy with the text shows. Over relatively spare stage direction, Sampson has added layers of texture, from rhapsodic dance numbers and vocal interludes to a track from Janelle Monáe’s Electric Lady, just loud enough for audience members to realize what it is while listening to the dialogue that happens on top of it.

Moses Ingram and Leland Fowler

With it comes a particularly strong cast. Cab debut Erron Crawford is an indefatigable, endlessly morphing Elegba, whose insatiable hunger becomes a characteristic that is as unexpectedly endearing as it is defining. As Ogun, veteran Leland Fowler (who also assistant directed the work) displays an extraordinary capacity for feeling, overcoming a childhood stutter that turns his words, dripping with gravity and affection, into heavy, mature things you cannot help but feel in your very core. Jonathan Higginbotham becomes Shango, orisha of masculinity, as he dons a military uniform and slowly grows up, and Antoinette Crowe-Legacy provides spot-on comic relief — and some sage advice — as Aunt Elegua. 

Then there’s Oya, in a category entirely of her own, ultimately so sure of what she wants — and not always sure how to get it — that she’ll torture herself until she breaks. Actor Moses Ingram commits to a personality that can wrap around the deepest sadness and boomerang back in minutes, filling the role with spirit.

But there’s also something specific to McCraney’s work, which yokes African mythology and contemporary African-American life through notions of the divine. In a talkback after the performance, dramaturg Lisa Richardson suggested that this aspect — an exploration and celebration of black culture and black joy — was what stuck with her when the play had ended, Oya’s search for satisfaction finally resolved.

Black joy is pivotal to our survival to remain whole,” she said, referring to a series of program notes she had written. Taking that joy, giving of ourselves, and uplifting those around us ensures that in the darkest hours, the ability to go high — to fly — will remain”

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