Anyone wanting to get glib about Bruce Norris’s The Low Road might ballyhoo it as an 18th-century The Defiant Ones. But there’s no call to be off-hand about the imaginative, intelligent, and outrageously humorous comedy-drama.
Remember that Norris has proved to have those playwriting chops in abundance. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for Clybourne Park, and though it risks jinxing him, this enthusiastic observer is primed say that with the new work, he again looks to be an early favorite for the award.
If so or if not, he deserves profuse accolades, which he’ll happily share with Michael Grief’s encompassing direction and a cast of actors—several doubling tripling, quadrupling and even quintupling—seizing the marvelous opportunities to show off for the two and a half hours it takes to entertain what should be many future audiences.
So why the Defiant Ones reference in a script that takes place mostly between 1758 and 1776 and, say, 1778? Because for much of that time, Jim Trewitt (Chris Perfetti)—the surname can be read as “True Wit,” but is he?—and slave John Blanke (Chukwudi Iwuh) are shackled together as they flee across colonial territories.
Jim is a foundling raised by brothel-owning Mrs. Trewitt (Harriet Harris), with pipe-smoking sidekick Old Tizzy (Crystal A. Dickinson), after he arrives in a basket and with a note signed by a G. Washington. The note promises that on the baby boy’s seventeenth birthday, he’ll come into an inheritance.
The infant has a birthmark on his left buttock that Old Tizzy declares is ominous—and the grizzled woman is worth listening to—but that’s no discouraging omen for Mrs. Trewitt, who sniffs dollar signs. Also sniffing hard cash is Jim himself, who when a young boy (Jack Hatcher), comes upon Adam Smith’s draft for The Wealth of Nations and is taken by a paragraph declaring the wisdom of accumulating profit and exploiting its potential for growth. N.B. The Low Road is narrated by someone who should know about these things: Adam Smith (Daniel Davis) himself.
Grown to young manhood, Jim takes to running the whorehouse and its collection of scruffy goodtime gals and turning the income into a nest egg with which he absconds at his 17th birthday when G. Washington (Kevin Chamberlain) turns out (small spoiler follows) not to be George Washington but Gilbert Washington. Whereupon events darken and Jim has to go on the lam, at which point he decides he needs a servant. He successfully bargains a slave merchant (Danny Wolohan) for supposedly deaf, unresponsive John Blanke (another symbolic moniker), who happens to be anything but.
And that’s only the first half-hour of a madcap Norris adventure that could be described as a cornucopia of surprises. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that Jim and John represent not only their sometimes literally bound, sometimes figuratively bound selves but also represent, respectively, capitalist ideology and socialist ideology.
Yes, Norris—regularly driven by the desire to question contemporary troubled national race relations, as certainly explored in his Raisin on the Sun spin, Clybourne Park—has conjured another approach to deal with the thorny topics. He does so by offering a made-up story insisting that our current political ands problems are not new but have existed since the birth of the nation. He illustrates his serious contentions through a series of Jim and John escapades, either singly or in tandem, that are as much fun to ride along with as they are sobering. The two are repeatedly imperiled, one cliffhanger doled out as the act-one curtain.
But why give away more of their tribulations and treats? It’s sufficient to report that they encounter any number of wooly situations and hilariously diverse figures. Not the least of these—just to give one surprise partially away—is their stay with a Quaker-inspired community. Okay, one more. The moneyed Low household (Chamberlain, Harris among the members), for whom Jim becomes their conniving in situaccountant.
Incidentally “Low” is one of the running jokes Norris has on his title. Another is included in the act two opener, where—again a spoiler—Norris leaps from the 1770s to modern-day London where moderator Belinda (Harris) presides over a Forum for Economic Progress panel on which representative from a handful of countries moot theories. The American speaker has just published The High Road.
If there’s anything wrong with Greif’s production, it may be the one or two episodes too many. (Norris’s ambition excuses that). Otherwise, the contributions from set designer David Korins, lighting designer Ben Stanton, sound designer Matt Tierney and composer Mark Bennett (writing for Josh Henderson on violin) are way up to snuff (pun intended.) Ditto Emily Rebholz’s many period and contemporary costumes and the wig, hair and make-up by J. Jared Janas and Dave Bova.
And those costume and wigs, et cetera, get a vigorous workout as the players hurriedly jump into and out of them to do right not only by Norris’s words and imagined deeds but by themselves. Call this the so-far-undisputed ensemble of the year.
Only Perfetti, Iwuh, Davis and young Hatcher remain stalwarts in one role. Do Harris, Chamberlain, Dickinson, Wolohan, Max Baker, Susannah Perkins, Tessa Albertson, Gopal Divan, Johnny Newcomb, Richard Poe, Dave Quay, Aaron Michael Ray and Joseph Soeder lend sterling-silver qualities to their many roles? They do, and it’s surely a good bet that were they polled about their assignments, they’d reply that they’re having one of the best times of their acting careers.
Watching The Low Road, a spectator has no trouble detecting where Norris stands on the ever-continuing capitalism and racist conflicts. The title is an obvious hint. The triumph here is that someone so rightly disturbed about conditions in a Trump-afflicted world could easily give in to polemic. Norris does the opposite and thereby earns a grateful pat on the back.
The Low Road opened March 7, 2018 at the Public Theater and closes April 8. Information and tickets: publictheater.org.
