If you’re a Bostonian, the only way to join the fan club for playwright Suzan-Lori Parks is to read the four volumes of her dramas already in print from Theatre Communications Group. Either that or you travel. The string of credits affixed to Parks’s name include two Obie Awards and a MacArthur " genius " grant. Her play Topdog/Underdog is about to open on Broadway. She has written several screenplays, among them Spike Lee’s Girl 6; and Disney Theatricals has engaged her to write the libretto for a new musical called Hoopz. Undiscovered, she is not.
Yet apart from a 1994 production of her The America Play by the American Repertory Theatre, local producers have avoided her work. Perhaps the difficulty lies in trying to categorize her plays, which incorporate fevered fantasy characters such as the black man in America Play and Top Dog/Underdog who makes his living as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator, not to mention poetic dialogue that veers from the visionary to the most degrading of images.
So it’s all to the good that one of the newest theater companies on the block, Zeitgeist Stage Company, is presenting the Boston premiere of In the Blood, a 2000 Pulitzer Prize nominee. Would that the production — even when allowance is made for the sparse resources of the fledgling troupe — delivered the bang of the script.
Parks based In the Blood tangentially on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, in order to write about a spurned, unmarried woman of color (named Hester) who has given birth to five children by different fathers, all of them absent but one. And like her literary predecessor, she won’t tell his name. Instead, she lives under a bridge with the kids on grudging handouts from Welfare and keeps hoping for a " leg up " on her problems. She is also illiterate, recognizing only the letter " A, " which she practices writing on her chalkboard. A righteous circle of accusers mouth the prevailing attitudes toward impoverished welfare mothers who have no " treasures, " as Hester calls her children, other than those produced from their wombs.
As portrayed for Zeitgeist by Ramona L. Alexander, Hester is gullible beyond Parks’s conception, letting the other characters have their way with her. Alexander makes Hester into an entirely passive character — no Mother Courage but a Cinderella whose series of would-be fairy godmothers leave her sitting at the dark edges of the American dream. Her hooker friend cheats her out of money and lusts after her body. The kindly physician with the street-curb practice arranges for her to " spayed. " The Welfare lady, also a black woman, invites her in for an afternoon of tea-and-sympathy with her husband that turns into a swinger party with Hester as the filling in the sexual sandwich. And then there’s Reverend D. (read: Dimmesdale), a remorseless street preacher up from the gutter who fathered Hester’s last child and still wants her, but only at the back door and on her knees.
Speaking in a little-girl voice, Alexander plays Hester as the perennial victim, denying the complexity of anger and recognition of injustice that boils in the play’s subtext until the climax. When Hester finally takes revenge, it backfires on her in horrible ways. The other five actors, mostly untrained but appealing, rotate between playing the judgmental and exploitative adults and playing Hester’s children, the latter presented in that appalling manner of grown-ups pretending at Peter Pan.
Alexander and the rest of the cast are left adrift on stage, looking for a director to lead them through Parks’s imaginative exposé of the self-serving misinterpretation of the golden rule that passes for charity, its inadequacy compounded by the inability of its recipients to escape its deadening effects. And the production’s incoherent design scheme would certainly be bettered by a bare-stage production. Both problems point at director and scenic designer David J. Miller. (He’s also founder and artistic director of the Zeitgeist Stage Company.)
The production’s affecting moments come with the monologues, particularly when Tina Gaffney as the Welfare case worker gets off on her entitlement in comparison with Hester’s precarious situation. In these moments, when the words are spoken simply, the play’s the thing — the obligation of actors to playwrights from Hamlet’s time down to ours.
