nothin When The Old South Haunts The New | New Haven Independent

When The Old South Haunts The New

T. Charles Erickson Photos

Benja Kay Thomas, Jacob Perkins, Leah Karpel, Roderick Hill.

When you hear the term Southern Gothic,” what do you think of? Racism, incest, misogyny, patriarchy, madness, suicide, a crumbling old house in which, at some level of symbolism, the white supremacist evils of the Confederacy eat away at the foundations of civilized society? Boo Killebrew’s Miller, Mississippi has it all, served up with a persistent backdrop of newscasts — from 1960 to 1994 — to help us keep track.

The story concerns the Miller family and their passage through the times that were a‑changing while local forces did all they could to keep the racial status quo in place. The family’s patriarch — a judge — is dispensed with in the first scene, a powerful opening that betokens a play about the dark domesticity of a family’s secrets and retributions. It will fall to the children to determine if they are going to perpetuate the sins of the father or work for progress in the Civil Rights period.

The play, which was presented as part of the Long Wharf’s Contemporary American Voices Festival in 2016, is directed by Lee Sunday Evans and runs at Long Wharf’s Stage II through Feb. 3.

We first meet the three Miller siblings — Thomas, Becky, and John — as children listening, spellbound, to a ghost story about a crying house as told by the family maid, Doris (Benja Kay Thomas). The kids have heard it before but love hearing it again, giving Thomas, the eldest, opportunities to question the action, and John, the youngest, the chance to recite the parts he loves best. We see the three grow into adults, in a very deliberate trajectory rather lacking in surprise at how they grow. As Thomas, Roderick Hill has a stolidity that can be unnerving, his anger constrained and cold. Becky goes through the biggest change — from a girl with hopes to a hopeless case — and Leah Karpel makes Becky’s weakness over such large swathes of time almost believable. Jacob Perkins’ John is the most engaging, providing what flashes of humor the play offers, and moving from rebuff to rebuff until reaching an end that points its finger at yet another national failing.

Charlotte Booker, Perkins, Karpel, Hill.

Mrs. Miller — Mildred (Charlotte Booker) — is a matriarch well-versed in Southern charm as a means to never say what needs to be said. She shakes her head about civil rights workers as masochists, recognizing that wanting change is welcoming pain. Midway through the play she berates her daughter about the need for cotillions and coming-out-parties as a means for a young lady to latch onto a man and get the hell out of this house.” As though the house, both presentable and creepy in Kristen Robinson’s wonderful split-level set, with choice lighting by Amith Chandrashaker, were the cause of the misery here.

Twin calendars, at times glowing, get their top sheets torn off as we go along. Broadcasts apprise us of the killing of three civil-rights workers in Mississippi in 1964, the non-fatal shooting of James Meredith after he enrolled in the previously all-white University of Mississippi in 1966, the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968, and so on. Eventually — after a significant gap from 1969 to 1980 — we see Ronald Reagan’s election as president and, finally, in 1994, we arrive at talk radio babble and Thomas’s bid for political office. The way in which he spins” his particular wounds is depressingly and shamelessly real.

Perkins, Karpel, Hill.

But by 1969, the point at which the siblings seem set to go their own ways, we’ve learned about the dangers and challenges facing each character. In one of the play’s best scenes, John, newly returned to town, confronts Doris, desperate to be taken in by her and her son as his real family.” The harshness of Doris’s rebuff — so many years after the kind and supportive service she rendered the Millers — is both striking and pointed. There’s a story behind this story — Doris’s — that gets underplayed (her son we never even meet), so that we can stay with the folks in the big house, wearing their pastiche of tropes from O’Neill to Williams to Kushner, and forced into a rendering of how real time affects real lives.

Miller, Mississippi aims to give us a history lesson while at the same time providing some of the chills that tales of the Old South offer, letting us glimpse a world that still haunts our own. And yet, for the story to reach some kind of useful catharsis, at least one of the characters would have to find someone to talk to rather than the other characters in the play. Amongst themselves, their story has a foregone conclusion.

Miller, Mississippi runs at Long Wharf Theatre, 222 Sargent Dr., through Feb. 2. Click here for tickets and more information.

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