Evan Linder – Memphis Flyer

Closure is for Caucasians? That’s my only real criticism of Byhalia, Mississippi, Evan Linder’s refreshingly antiromantic comedy of Southern manners. Unfortunately, I can’t say much more on the topic without giving the whole thing away.

Byhalia, Mississippi, a winner of Playhouse on the Square’s annual new play competition, centers around Laurel and Jim, a struggling young married couple who like each other so much you can’t help but root for them. Jim’s flings are in the past, but Laurel’s brief indiscretion is only discovered when her white trash baby is born with African-American features. Hysteria ensues from all quarters.

Laurel isn’t the world’s best mom. She says inappropriate things and sneaks off to the roof to smoke joints and stuff. But she gets one thing exactly right: There are too many rules and too many standards for applying them. Start simple with “Love each other, and tell the truth.” Build from there.

Director John Maness assembled a strong ensemble that includes Marc Gill as a family friend who seems to have a secret of his own and Evan McCarley as Jim, Laurel’s unemployed husband. Jessica Johnson gets the most audience response as Ayesha, the status-conscious wife of the man who fathered Laurel’s baby, and Gail Black is especially effective as Celeste, Laurel’s conservative mother. Collectively these actors tell stories about growing up, grouping up, pairing up, and growing apart in a world where nobody’s racist and everything is.

Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man,” is slyly referenced throughout the show, although Jeannie C. Riley’s “Harper Valley PTA” may be the more appropriate song. Byhalia is treated like a gossipy “little Peyton Place” full of “Harper Valley hypocrites.”

Not so long ago, audiences for new work were hard to come by. Byhalia, Mississippi sold out its opening night. This is fantastic news. Hopefully, it won’t be the last sellout for this promising young play.

Byhalia, Mississippi is at TheatreWorks through January 31st.

The Brothers Size uses West African myths and modern theater traditions to tell an intense tale of siblings who make vastly different life choices but remain connected.

Playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney is attracted to theater because live performance isn’t passive. Theaters are places where people go to imagine collectively. To that end, his inventive narratives are set in poetic environments. Actors turn words into scenery. They speak stage directions, conjuring ghost communities out of breath and percussive movement. That’s why the Hattiloo’s prosaic take on McCraney’s three-character epic is a little disappointing. Ritual and naturalistic acting take turns when they should blend. Lengthy blackouts and an unnecessary intermission wreck fluidity. A piece of theater that aspires to music becomes a run-of-the-mill play.

Donrico Webber is a terrific actor. He was eerily convincing as Malcolm X in the Hattiloo’s short-lived production of The Meeting and is similarly real as Ogun Size, the serious-minded mechanic who hires his ex-con brother Oshoosi to keep him out of trouble. After two years in the hole, Oshoosi, effectively played by Courtney Williams Robertson, is given a choice between two very different visions of freedom. He might pick Ogun’s monotonous prisoner-of-work vision or the more leisurely option presented by Oshoosi’s former cellmate Elegba, a sexually ambiguous trickster played by Ronnie Bennett.

Director Brooke Sarden made Katori Hall’s idiom-rich Hurt Village soar in 2012, but can’t seem to get The Brothers Size off the ground. The spoken stage directions are treated like obstacles instead of opportunities. Movement sequences become self-contained bits set apart from all the regular acting.

McCraney populates his fictional Louisiana bayou town with characters who are always on the verge of bursting into song. The Hattiloo’s cast won’t be remembered for its vocal prowess, but, figuratively speaking, The Brothers Size is at its best when it sings. Webber and Robertson may butcher “Try a Little Tenderness,” but the most authentic moments happen when the actors become an air band, working out Temptations-style dance moves and playing together like kids. Transcendent.

If Trayvon Martin were your son, would you want him presumed innocent and given the benefit of the doubt? If confronting your community’s prejudiced past boosted the odds of a more equitable future for black residents, wouldn’t you embrace the lesson? These questions and themes of empathy, honesty, and forgiveness form the foundation of playwright Evan Linder’s latest work, Byhalia, Mississippi, which has its world premiere at TheatreWorks in Memphis, and three other cities, January 8th.

Linder, co-artistic director of Chicago’s New Colony theater, always knew he’d write what he calls a “red-state show.” And what better place to locate such a show than the town down the road from his parents’ Collierville home, a place with a painful and mostly overlooked racial history?

When Linder wrote Byhalia, Mississippi in January 2014, he had 17-year-old Trayvon Martin and and the black boy’s killer, neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, on his mind.

On a drive through the tiny Byhalia town square, Linder snapped a photo of a black teen outside a barbershop. The boy wore a hooded sweatshirt like the one Trayvon had on when Zimmerman fatally shot him. The photo, which is on the play’s website, frames a central question for the character Jim Parker, who is white.

Wrote Linder: “What would it take (and was it even possible) for Jim to see a boy in a hoodie walking across the street in Byhalia and immediately register that young man as someone else’s child before seeing a young black male? And could he ever see that child as his own?”

The play begins with Jim and his wife, Laurel, also white, expecting their first child. To Jim’s surprise, the baby is born with brown skin. The child is the product of Laurel’s brief affair with Paul Price, the married black principal of Byhalia High School.

As the Parkers’ marriage reels and Ayesha, Price’s wife, grapples with the proof of her husband’s infidelity, she confronts Laurel, who is naïve about what it means to raise a black boy in Byhalia.

Laurel knows about Byhalia’s best-known decedent, author William Faulkner, Ayesha snaps, but does she know about Butler Young Jr. or Alfred “Skip” Robinson?

Here Linder whets the audience’s appetite with a bit of history from the 1970s, when Byhalia was the scene of what Time magazine called “one of the longest civil rights boycotts in Mississippi history.”

The boycotts of white-owned businesses were sparked by the death of Young, a 21-year-old, unarmed black man shot and killed under questionable circumstances by Byhalia police in the summer of 1974. Robinson led the protests as president of the United League of Marshall County.

Then, like now, black residents demanded that the officers involved be charged with murder. Then, like now, black citizens used the only power they had — economic — to try to force the white power structure to give them a measure of justice.

Then, like #blacklivesmatter activists today have found, justice was elusive.

According to a 1974 Harvard Crimson article, “The population of the town is 750 persons, and although 70 per cent of them are black, the mayor, the town leader and all the merchants are white.”

And while Faulkner, who merely died in Byhalia, gets a shout-out on the town’s website, the boycotts, which could be a source of pride and a testament to black citizens’ resilience, are unmentioned.

“People have been fine with letting that history slip away,” Linder said.

The play is not meant to be an indictment of Byhalia specifically, Linder noted, but of our collective selective memory and how our failure to reckon with it honestly hamstrings our future.

As Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Linder, who is white, wants to do his part to deal honestly with race, and this play is a start. “The only way things change is if people are forced to look at it.”

Editor’s note: The world premiere of Byhalia, Mississippi is January 8th in Memphis, Chicago, Toronto, and Charleston, South Carolina. Readings will occur in Los Angeles, Boulder, Colorado, and Birmingham, Alabama, in mid-January. On January 18th, audiences from all seven cities can participate in an online conversation. Go to wpconvo.com/online-conversation to join. Byhalia, Mississippi runs January 8-31 at TheatreWorks in Memphis.