“The Wedding Band” Asks Can Interracial Lovers Overcome Bigotry
The excitement for this show is high, with opening nite and another performance sold out before it opened Thursday night at the Jone Playhouse on the UW campus.
This production falls near the close of the vitally important collaboration between the Initman Theatre Festival and the Hansberry Project. Beginning in May and running to early October, the Rise Up collaboration has brought full productions of this play and Stick Fly by Lydia R. Diamond at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute, plus evenings of shorter plays and play readings. It’s part of Intiman’s and the Hansberry Project’s commitment to “create connections among the writers and with the Seattle community” and provide “a clear demonstration that Seattle is a city committed to supporting and celebrating Black women playwrights.” The project reached out and successfully crowdfunded the $75,000 needed to produce the season.
Valerie Curtis-Newton, the director, a very much in demand Drama Professor at the highly ranked UW School of Drama, is the 2016 co-curator of Intiman’s season and co-founder of the Hansberry Project.
The play is by Alice Childress, the author of Trouble in Mind (1957) that Curtis-Newton also directed for Intiman in 2013.
Childress completed Wedding Band in 1962. It is set in rural South Carolina during World War I. Lovers Julia (a black seamstress played with heartbreaking sincerity by Debra Woods) and Herman (a white baker played from a brave heart by Chris Ensweiler) want to get married. They have been lovers for 10 years, and over that time Julia has had to move frequently. She longs for a place where they can be open with their affections and not have to deal with bigotry—from either blacks or whites. She is very much alone.
Is it necessary to remind you that South Carolina is in the Jim Crow south? Well it is. Due to this subject matter and realism, no one wanted to produce it in New York. Rudy Dee starred in the eventual New York Shakespeare Festival production in 1972.
The story is ultimately tragic for just as soon as Herman has scraped together the passage for both of them to travel north he succumbs to the flu. In 1918, South Carolina had many military bases that were hit hard by the epidemic and medical help in the state was quickly overrun by the number of sick people. The play makes a point about quick official actions to quarantine cases and in the effort to avoid even more difficulties Julia accepts that Herman’s family needed to come and intercede on his behalf.
Anne Allgood as “Herman’s Mother,” as the role is called in the list of characters, follows his sister Annabelle (Amanda Hilson) to Herman’s sick bed—inside Julia’s rented room. Allgood enters costumed in the gray colors of the Confederacy and in stark contrasts to the muted colors and white fabrics of all the other characters. Kudos to Mark Mitchell the costume designer for this touch.
Putting Herman’s Mother and Herman’s black lover in spitting distance of each other generated enough mutual recriminations and name calling to burn down the whole state. Turns out that Herman’s family has deep roots in the white racist legacy of the south.
Sick, feverish, and being carried out of Julia’s home by Nelson, a black soldier home on leave before shipping out to the war, Herman began to recite a speech by John C. Calhoun he had learned as a child and won an award reciting. Calhoun had a varied career in the federal government’s legislative and executive branches from 1810 to his death in 1850. He owned slaves and was a strong defender of white Sountherner’s slaveholding rights. He was sick and dying but still managed to write a ferocious attack against the Compromise of 1850 which is considered his most famous speech and the one that Herman had memorized. Calhoun’s ideas influenced the southern states to leave the Union over the issue of slavery.
Has his illness with the prodding of his mother released some “deeper” sentiment in Herman that are more powerful than his love for Julia? Can their relationship survive this stress test? You’ll have to go and see.
The casting is perfect in this production and every actor, including the child actors, carry off their roles with great skill. The scenery showing both a yard and the interior of Julia’s room complete with period bed, storage boxes, dressers, and steamer trunk fills the tiny stage area inside the three-sided seating arrangement at the Jones Playhouse. This could be yet another award winner for Set Designer Jennifer Zeyl.
Note: The Rise Up three-day gathering of working black female playwrights will close with “Black Women Wisdom: A Public Conversation” on Sept. 24 at 2 PM, $10, also in the Jones Playhouse.
Cast | Artistic Team |
Julia Augustine – Debra Woods* | Director – Valerie Curtis-Newton |
Teeta – Niani Maulana | Set Designer – Jennifer Zeyl** |
Mattie – Aishé Keita* | Costume Designer – Mark Mitchell |
Fanny Johnson – Tracy Michelle Hughes* | Lighting Designer – Robert Aguilar** |
Lula Green – Shaunyce Omar* | Sound Designer – Matt Starritt** |
Nelson Green – Jason Sanford | Stage Managers – Liana Dillaway & Amber K Lewandowski |
Bell Man – Martyn Krouse | |
Princess – Darrah Mehlberg | |
Herman – Chris Ensweiler• | |
Annabelle – Amanda Hilson | |
Herman’s Mother – Anne Allgood* | |
* Denotes a member of Actors’ Equity Association the Union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers. | ** Denotes a member of the IATSE USA 829, the union of professional Stage Designers. |
Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White by Alice Childress, directed by Valerie Curtis-Newton. Runtime: 2 hours with no intermission. Rise Up, a collaboration of Intiman Theatre Festival and the Hansberry Project. University District. Jones Playhouse, 4045 University Way NE. Wed – Sat at 7:30 PM; Sun 2 PM. Tickets: Intiman Theatre Festival: intiman.secure.force.com/ticket. Closes Oct. 2.