Every family has that relative: the historian. They’re the ones who preserve the photos, keep the albums, and, most important, tell the stories. The ones who know who married whom, who divorced whom, what happened to their children, and who to talk about in hushed tones. It’s usually an aunt, uncle, or cousin—someone who talks your ear off at holiday dinners. (But how do you think they got all that family gossip in the first place?)
In Brittany K. Allen’s thoughtful, quick-witted Redwood at Ensemble Studio Theatre, it’s 51-year-old Uncle Stevie (Tyrone Mitchell Henderson), who’s currently “funemployed” and otherwise unencumbered. He just moved back to Baltimore, he explains, thanks to a “minor change in my domestic situation-ship.… He got the condo, I got my groove back. So, fair!” Hence, his Durbin family research project.
“I was in my hip-hop dance class when the idea came unto me,” he writes in a mass email to all of the relations, including his twin sister, Beverly (Portia), and her daughter, Meg (playwright Allen, also a terrific actress, recently seen in Clubbed Thumb’s Deep Blue Sound). His “old a cappella pal Jonas” went on Ancestry.com and discovered that his people are 0.9% Navajo! “So I got to thinking: what if we all were to spend some time mucking around in our own history?”
The presentation—in the midst of a sweaty gym class, music blaring, all the others outpacing Stevie (“they are like, trained professional dancers,” he observes)—might be comical, yet the idea is anything but. The Durbins know that their great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, Alameda (Bryn Carter), was a slave. Imagine their surprise when Stevie manages to track down—deep breath—“a living descendant of the original owners of the Durbin clan.” In Baltimore! And this guy is actually a distant relative, because oh yes: The master had two sons with Alameda.
“Wild, right? To think they might have been star-crossed. Lovers in the wrong time,” Beverly opines. “Absolutely not,” Meg counters. “What you need to do is give me a break over here, little miss Black Panther,” continues her mom. He left her his fortune! It’s not unlike that movie—” She means Show Boat.
While Stevie attempts to fill in the blanks—“Just reaching out to all the leaves on the tree so I can get this forest poppin,” he says—Meg’s white boyfriend, Drew (Drew Lewis) is compelled to dig into his own family history. No spoilers, but what he discovers is disconcerting and complicated, and throws a wrench into his and Meg’s relationship. They’ve been sailing along pretty smoothly, seemingly undisturbed by any issues relating to race; the warp-speed song-and-dance re-creation of their meet-cute and dating, which includes a fun nod to Grease’s “Summer Nights,” is an absolute joy. (Director Mikhaela Mahony and choreographer Sasha Hutchings deserve major credit for making that whiz-bang sequence work on the tiny EST stage.) But now Meg is full of questions and doubts: “I want to be sure you don’t have a blind spot or a guilt complex or a fetish for Black girls,” she says.
Drew’s father, Tatum (Denny Dale Bess, who also plays the man who owned Alameda), brushes off his son’s upsetting questions with a couple dusty clichés: “What’s in the past is in the past,” and “you can’t pick your family.” Well, here’s another one: You can’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’ve been. And Redwood is a brilliant reminder. As Stevie says: “It’s nice to imagine the ancestors are looking out, from some cosmic plane.”
Redwood opened Oct. 26, 2023, at Ensemble Studio Theatre and runs through Nov. 12. Tickets and information: ensemblestudiotheatre.org
