In the #MeToo era, there’s the suggestion that women are making progress in reaching societal parity with men. But slow going persists, and Marcus Gardley’s mesmerizing play, The House That Will Not Stand, could be taken as a metaphor for the situation.
Sipped straight, it also feels like an almost unique glimpse at women attempting to liberate themselves from patriarchal suppression. If there’s anything comparable in dramatic literature annals, it might be Garcia Lorca’s classic, The House of Bernarda Alba. The 1936 play, first performed in 1945, might give those who know it some sense of the milieu in which Gardley steeps his opus and what elegantly and painfully transpires there.
Even before the tormented action begins, Yi Zhao’s lights are up on Adam Rigg’s living room—and parts of other rooms—in a stately home decorating the New Orleans Faubourg Tremé district. At the upstage portion of the room the body of a man lies on a high riser.
The only man seen in Gardley’s play—but definitely not heard by the audience, although some of the characters think they hear him—he’s Lazare Albans. Much earlier, Albans did what men of the time did. (This is 1813.) He set up Beartrice (Lynda Gravátt), his black mistress, in a house for which she does not hold the deed. The common practice was called placée.
Now that he’s dead, Beartrice is in danger of forfeiting her home to Mrs. Albans. That will put her extended family of women at risk. Those immediately endangered are her three daughters by Albans—Agnés (Nedra McClyde), who expects to begin placée moves at a masked ball that night; Maude Lynn (Juliana Garfield), who has a strong religious streak in her; and Odette (Joniece Abbott-Pratt), whose dark skin upsets her but whose luxuriant hair pleases her.
Often confined upstairs is Beartrice’s mad sister Marie-Josephine (Michelle Wilson). Often holding sway throughout the house—when not being put in her place by Beartrice—is the slave Makeda (Harriett D. Foy), who’s distinction is her status as a conjure woman in the tradition of the famous New Orleans conjure woman, Marie Laveau. (Laveau’s impressive tomb is in the New Orleans cemetery. Likely Makeda’s isn’t.)
The remaining character is La Veuve (Marie Thomas), once a good friend to Beartrice but now her sworn enemy, a status that doesn’t stop her from visiting the Albans abode regularly and, in particular, hoping to poach Makeda once Beartrice has signed the conjure woman’s long-withheld freedom papers.
Like a knife slicing through the air, the action unfolds several hours after Lazare has died—and started the others thinking that Beartrice killed him, thanks to the fish bone caught in his throat. Tribulations continue when Agnés and Odette sneak off to the masked ball in defiance of Beartrice’s restriction. When a torrid summer storm hits—“it’s hotter than a whore’s mouth” gets said, while much fanning abounds—they’re fetched home and punished.
Along the way, La Veuve snoops around, Marie-Josephine wreaks some havoc, Makeda completes some conjuring that sets the daughters dancing (to Raja Feather Kelly’s movements) and Beartrice exercises whatever authority she has over them all, only to realize her hegemony is fast waning.
Before the final blackout in a two-act work that’s been developed both at Berkeley Rep and in England before arriving at New York Theatre Workshop, Gardley spotlights (often literally) the woman in many of the social positions at which they might easily be placed (placéed?) today. Pointedly, they’re never in full command of their positions. Most significantly, Beartrice may rule the roost, but she’s roosting tentatively.
For the duration playwright Gardley has the working-for-grace-under-pressure figures utter scabrous dialogue. They may have dubious futures, but that doesn’t stop them from expressing themselves colorfully. Their lower-stratum placement may even be spurring the cynicism. At one point the line “her heart needs to have a long chat with her head” pops out. At another heated moment, someone is “madder than a three-legged dog trying to bury a bone.”
Polite vulgarity also intrudes. When La Veuve and Beartrice discuss the latter’s hard-nosed relationship with the deceased Lazare and the possibility of Beartrice’s poisoning him with a dish she cooked, the tough cane-wielding lady proclaims she did serve him a “sweet pie” repeatedly but insists she’s not a baker. Indicating her groin, she avers, “My pie is that sweet.” You can be sure that that graphic declaration had the audience loudly oooohing.
The elegance of Gardley’s prose and Rigg’s set is greatly enhanced by the actors as they circulate in Montana Levi Blanco’s predominantly black costumes and as they glide under Lileana Blain-Cruz’s style-establishing direction. The always-formidable Gravátt heads a cast of equals, each of whom instills believable late 18th-century presence into her assignment. Gardley sees to it that every one of them has at least one taking-focus moment. It’s another tactic in his suave fight on behalf of woman’s equality.
The House That Will Not Stand opened July 30, 2018, at the New York Theatre Workshop and runs to August 12: Tickets and information: nytw.org
