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A heartwarming 'Home' returns to off-Broadway
By MICHAEL KUCHWARA,AP Drama Critic AP - Tuesday, December 9
NEW YORK - For a critic anyway, "heartwarming" can be the scariest adjective. But don't let the word _ highly appropriate in this case _ deter you from visiting "Home," Samm-Art Williams' deeply felt memory play.
The production, now being revived by off-Broadway's Signature Theatre Company, is part of the Signature's season-long salute to the Negro Ensemble Company where playwrights such as Williams, Charles Fuller and Leslie Lee were nurtured a generation or so ago.
In 1980, "Home" made its way from the NEC to Broadway where it ran for more than 250 performances and was nominated for a best-play Tony. You can see why in this excellent Signature re-examination of the play, featuring a trio of accomplished actors, Kevin T. Carroll, January LaVoy and Tracey Bonner.
It's Carroll who portrays the central figure, Cephus Miles, sort of a Candide-like Everyman, who makes the journey from tiny, rural Cross Roads, N.C., to a big, bad city up North and then comes home again. Along the way, he is ditched by his girlfriend, drafted and sent to prison for refusing to fight in Vietnam.
The man's life after jail is a downward spiral, before he pulls himself back from the brink by returning _ where else? _ home.
A natural storyteller, Williams has a gift for creating memorable portraits, vivid pictures of specific people who meet Cephus on his travels to self-awareness and maturity. Most of those are the people who live in and around Cross Roads, a sleepy hamlet where people make moonshine, slaughter their own hogs, gamble in the white folks' cemetery, attend the Saturday night fish fry, settle down and get married.
These men and women come to life in the performances of the three hardworking actors. Carroll, in particular, anchors the play. He has an ingratiating style, an easygoing, wide-open demeanor that makes Cephus the kind of guy you want to root for.
The two actresses portray a parade of people, with the striking LaVoy standing out as Pattie May, who is Cephus' true love throughout the ups and downs of his life. Bonner gets the more sassy roles, from a scrappy city woman of easy virtue to a bus driver who brings Cephus back home after all his adventures.
Williams' imaginative language is almost poetic in nature. The words tumble out, particularly in the often fragmented descriptions of Cross Roads, a highly appropriate name for the place that shapes this man's life.
Director Ron OJ Parson unfurls the action on a wooden, multilevel setting, on which hang some of the props and costumes that will be used during the production. There is an astonishing fluidity to all this movement. The play's many vignettes blend effortlessly into each other on the small Signature stage that truly becomes the town of Cross Roads.
"I love the land," Cephus loudly proclaims throughout the evening. That love joyfully reverberates throughout "Home," a play that is not afraid of a happy ending.
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