Premiering at the Public Theater only three days after American Son bowed on Broadway, Eve’s Song is yet another drama that asserts how difficult and dangerous it is today for black people to live in America.
Initially an uneasy comedy that eventually turns tragic, Eve’s Song more or less centers upon Deborah (De’Adre Aziza), the recently divorced mother of Lauren (Kadijah Raquel), a college student, and Mark (Karl Green), a high school geek. A corporate vice president beset by office worries, Deborah strives to rear her kids in please-and-thank-you politeness, as the play’s opening scene during a family meal attests with its civil chitchat and flourishes of cloth napkins.
Yet something is off kilter about this sequence, which suggests a parody of bougie domesticity.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★ review here.]
Hanging on the wall is a large print of Ellis Wilson’s Funeral Procession, which fans of The Cosby Show may recall from its presence in the Huxtable home. Then, even as Deborah says to her children, “Our home is our safe place,” a wraith-like black woman—who may well have stepped out of the painting—materializes and silently glides through the room.
This spooky figure (Vernice Miller), identified in the program as a Spirit Woman, is later joined by two others like her (Rachel Watson-Jih and Tamara M. Williams). In subsequent monologues during the 100-minute drama, the ghosts relate how they were abused and brutally murdered. Apparently they silently haunt this family’s home.
A naïve young woman only newly out as a lesbian, Lauren meets and quickly becomes fascinated by Upendo (Ashley D. Kelley), an extremely self-assured community activist. Later, when Upendo joins the family for dinner, her outspoken conversation disconcerts Deborah with assertions such as “Looking perfect and respectable won’t save us, keeping your head down and mouth shut won’t always keep you safe.”
A jagged crack appears in the dining room wall and then grows wider as the drama turns darker.
Patricia Ione Lloyd, the playwright, frames this sorrowful story as a series of degenerating dinner scenes peppered with vivid monologues. Deborah gradually reveals how her corporate existence has become a hellish mix of misogyny, sexual harassment, and racism. Lauren vents immature fears and rhapsodizes about her sexual awakenings. Among the Spirit Women arias, one tells of being killed for being transgender. Mark, the lone male in the story, rates only one such solo about his troubles, but the playwright swirls around him outside voices that speak of shootings and the deaths of young black men.
Expressive as she is with words, Lloyd is not entirely in control of her narrative, as the focus for too long a time diverts from Deborah to the affair between Lauren and Upendo. The play’s title and desolate ending is augured by Upendo’s observation regarding how ever since the Garden of Eden, all black women are born with a song inside themselves: “We remember our song when we die and we sing it with the spirits that come to take us in death,” she says.
Jo Bonney, the director, smoothly coordinates the text’s transitions between monologues and dialogue in conjunction with lighting designer Lap Chi Chu and set designer Riccardo Hernandez, who rearranges subtly iridescent walls for various locations. Their visual realization for the story’s grievous conclusion is apt. The play’s tricky shifts in tone are not so successfully managed, however, by the director and several of the actors. Nevertheless, De’Adre Aziza’s sensitively modulated portrayal of Deborah, a smart, staunch woman who desperately tries to do her best and never catches a break from anybody, is heartbreaking to witness.
