Theater Review by Carol Rocamora . . . .
Every once in a while, a small, forgotten play resurfaces, making a great and joyful noise. Such is the case with the beautiful revival of Home, Samm-Art Williams’s 1979 gem, currently playing at the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Todd Haimes Theatre. It’s a moving, coming-of-age story—or, more accurately, a “coming home” story—about a Black American from North Carolina during the mid-twentieth century, set in both rural and urban environs.
Williams, a gifted, Black American playwright, has been overlooked on our New York mainstages for decades. Thankfully, the late Todd Haimes, beloved artistic director of the Roundabout, had a vision. In 2021, he created “The Refocus Project” to help broaden the definition of a classic. The project’s goal is to spotlight plays that since their openings haven’t “entered the constellation of famous works—not because of their merits, but because of their writers’ identities,” as Scott Ellis, interim artistic director elaborates in the play’s program notes.
Roundabout is now staging the first full production to emerge from the Refocus Project—namely, Home, Williams’s overlooked play which is being directed by Roundabout’s senior resident director Kenny Leon. Ellis goes on in his program notes to say that his only sadness is that Haimes (who died in 2023) isn’t here to see it and share in the joy of its rediscovery.
Home tells the story of Cephus Miles, born in rural North Carolina. He’s a young man whose profound love of land, God, and family is mightily tested. Told by the play’s three characters: Cephus (Tory Kittles), Woman One (Brittany Inge), and Woman Two (Stori Ayers), it has the rhythm of a narrative poem, drawing you in with its mellifluous phrasing. All three narrate, and the women play multiple roles with Cephus when there are scenes to be enacted. The effect is spellbinding.
The story is divided into four chapters spanning three decades, charting Cephus’s journey as he faces manhood, a moral crisis, disillusionment, spiritual degeneration, and ultimate redemption. With its poetic narration and epic proportion, it resonates like a story from the Bible or mythology.
We meet young Cephus, orphaned at an early age, growing up on his grandfather’s farm in Cross Roads, North Carolina. “I love the land—the soft, beautiful, black sod,” he declares. A conscientious young man, passionate about the land, he nonetheless has his adolescent moments: making bootleg whiskey at fifteen, gambling in the graveyard, throwing dice on the vaults, and, of course, falling in love. “She’s my soft summer day,” says Cephus of Patti Mae, the object of his affection. When they attempt to make love for the first time, however, they are interrupted by the news of Cephus’s grandfather’s death. The responsibility to run the farm now belongs to Cephus.
Meanwhile, Patti Mae leaves rural North Carolina to go to teacher’s college and ends up marrying a lawyer. “God is on vacation in Miami,” laments Cephus, suffering from the blow. He faces yet another test. In the 1960s, he refuses to be drafted and serve in the army: “I got 10 acres of corn, 15 cows, 73 chickens to worry about. What do I care about Viet Nam?” He declares himself a conscientious objector, and as a result, is forced to spend five years in prison in Raleigh. Having nothing to come home to (the farm was sold while he was in prison), he is lured to the city in 1971 (the script does not specify which city, heightening the mythological quality of his journey). He works at odd jobs for a while, shining shoes and sweeping barroom floors, and soon plummets into drink and addiction.
Ultimately, he finds redemption, after he learns that his grandfather’s farm has been re-purchased by an unidentified individual and deeded in Cephus’s name. He returns to Cross Roads (it’s now integrated) and the land he loves, where he is shocked to find that it is Patti Mae (now divorced) who bought the farm and put it in his name. His thirteen years of prison and city life (like Odysseus’s ten years at sea) are ended, and he has come home.
Arnulfo Maldonado’s set (lit by Allen Lee Hughes) features a single rocking chair downstage center against a shimmering backdrop, first of the farm country of North Carolina, then of the decaying American city. Its stark simplicity and towering scale enhance the power of the story.
The beauty of Samm-Art Williams’s narrative poetry is also enhanced by the three versatile performers. As Cephus, Tory Kittles wins us over with his nobility of heart, courage, humanity, vulnerability, and the abiding love of the land that ultimately saves him. His story personifies the triumph of the human spirit over the challenges of life. Brittany Inge and Stori Ayers function like a Greek chorus, playing the women of his past and present. Brittany Inge (Woman One) is an affecting Patti Mae (among other roles), and Stori Ayers (Woman Two) plays an impressive array of characters, especially in the city scenes where she serves as a social worker, a drug dealing opportunist, and a prostitute.
Watching Tory Kittles’ moving performance, I couldn’t help thinking about Troy Maxson in August Wilson’s celebrated Fences, written in 1985, six years after Home. Cephus joins Troy Maxson and other August Wilson protagonists whose composite portraits represent what it means to be a Black man in twentieth-century America. (I refer, of course, to August Wilson’s Century Cycle of a play for each decade.) Thanks to Todd Haimes’s vision, we’re reminded of Samm-Art Williams’s contribution to this vital dimension of the American theater.
Looking back on the production history of Home—first produced in 1979 at the Negro Ensemble Company, then transferred to Broadway in 1981; revived regionally in 1982 and 1985; and then again at the Signature Theater in 2008—I was also struck by the coincidental name of one of those regional theatres, namely, the Crossroads. It’s the same name as the rural town in North Carolina that Cephus called home. Are we at a crossroads of several generations of Black playwrights, and their contribution to the American theater? The revival of this jewel reminds us of the strong foundation upon which today’s flourishing Black American theater is built—one that includes Lorraine Hansberry, Samm-Art Williams, Charles Fuller, Ntozake Shange, Adrienne Kennedy, and others.
Another coincidence: Samm-Art Williams died on May 13, 2024, four days before the first preview of this play at the Roundabout. His tragic passing makes this production all the more meaningful. With this glowing revival of his play, we owe him remembrance, recognition, admiration, and gratitude.
Home. Through July 21 at the Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theatre (227 West 42nd Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues). www.roundabouttheatre.org
Photos: Joan Marcus