There are moments that only seem to happen in a theater. For obvious reasons they’re unlikely to occur in front of a television and rarely, if ever, to transpire in a movie house, no matter how full.
What I’m talking about is a moment or several moments when something taking place on stage suddenly holds the entire room breathless — or seemingly breathless. Surely, audience members are breathing but not only have they the impression they’re holding their breath but are convinced everyone else is doing the same.
Not a sound is heard, not a cough, not a throat clearing. The united crowd is aware of participating in something profoundly, revealingly human. It may continue when no one on stage is even speaking. A silence of utmost dramatic significance is taking place for a character or between two or more characters.
Such a sequence arises in director Awoye Timpo’s revival of Alice Childress’ Wedding Band at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn. Although “revival” is used here in its broadest sense. Written in the early 1960s, it only received a first New York City production at the Public Theater in 1972, as directed by Joseph Papp and Childress herself. Due to its subject — miscegenation — the play was habitually denied production in many other cities. (Childress’ 1955 Trouble in Mind, produced earlier this season, has had similar setbacks.)
As Timpo blocks the Wedding Band action, Julia Augustine (Brittany Bradford), a Black seamstress, and Herman (Thomas Sadoski), a white baker, are facing each other at close range. Childress has let spectators know they met in 1908 when she first entered his Charleston, South Carolina bakery and that now, in 1918, they are celebrating 10 years together with marriage often discussed but not yet given a date.
Just as Childress’ second act is nearing its close, they‘ve been separated for a short while. There’s been a devastating rift over the difference between their attitudes towards race. The conflict was brought on when Herman, felled in the 1918 pandemic, was taken away from Julia by his bluntly racist mother (Veanne Cox) and unconsciously biased sister Annabelle (Rebecca Haden).
Visibly recovered only somewhat, Herman has returned to the backyard cottage where Julia has been briefly residing to insist that she acknowledge his love. Julia argues that she has realized the difference between their outlooks can’t be breached. Director Timpo, knowing that for a moment Herman is at a loss for his next words, has Sadoski take a long pause before speaking again.
It might be that the extended pause is the production’s high point. During it, chances are good that everyone watching is hoping Herman will find those right words. And by the way, Childress’ subtitle, not in the Playbill, is A Love/Hate Story in Black and White.
Wedding Band is certainly a love/hate story in literal black and white. And this brutal tete-a-tete is alone worth the price of admission. It’s almost as if the title, for its dealing with miscegenation then illegal in South Carolina, might have been more accurate were it Wedding Banned. Indeed, Childress could have been punning. Moreover, she may have been having her way with language by calling her leading male figure Herman, which is, of course, a combination of “her man.“
Transcendent as the Julia-Herman confrontation is, there’s plenty preceding it as a look at a Black community when no one living there, as Childress points out, expected “a Black hero.” It’s a time when property owner Fanny Johnson (Elizabeth Van Dyke), from whom Julia is renting her secluded rooms, can repeatedly boast about being the first local Black women to have accomplished this or that.
It’s a time when Lula Green (Rosalyn Coleman) can bring up Nelson Green (Renrick Palmer) to join World War I with no expectation of being noticed for his participation. It’s a time when Mattie (Brittany Laurelle), who can’t read, raises her daughter Teeta (Phoenix Noelle), watches after Princess (Sofie Nesanelis), and hopes for better days. It’s a time when itinerant white Bell Man (Max Woertendyke) can set aside the goods he’s hawking to take for granted that asking Julia for a little nooky is perfectly acceptable.
These characters sometimes mingle lovingly, sometimes not so lovingly on Jason Ardizzone-West’s long and not too wide set of hardscrabble country, in Qween Jeans’ period costumes, and in Nikiya Mathis’ wigs, while Alphonso Horne’s jazz-inflected music occasionally comments. All this as Julia and her man Herman declare their troth verbally and physically until their (temporary?) split. Everyone mentioned here as well as lighting designer Stacey Derosier and sound designer Rena Anakwe do their high-level best.
Is Wedding Band, which has every right to ballyhoo the Julia-Herman face-off, a perfect play? No, but itemizing the few lapses in a work painfully appropriate to today’s rapidly increasing racist strains, would be caviling. It would be caviling, particularly when Childress, who was born in Charleston and apparently knew of a Wedding Band-like couple, makes a habit of slipping in any number of pithy comments on life — comments like “She’s never sick enough to die” and “Some truth has no nourishment in it” and “Bad taste sells.”
Good taste also deserves to sell. For a prime example: this powerful revival of Alice Childress’ Wedding Band.
Wedding Band opened May 8, 2022, at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center and runs through May 22. Tickets and information: tfana.org
