‘America Play’ has modern and historical themes

“The America Play,” the Department of Theatre and Drama’s current production at the Wells-Metz Theatre, is proudly defiant of classification. It is both historical drama and a critique of the current era.  

Through her 1994 play, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Suzan-Lori Parks proposes the excavation of truth by means of displacing the dirt in America’s past and ripping up the roots for closer inspection.

The first act is 90 percent monologue from a character known only as the Foundling Father, played by Jamaal McCray. Decked in a false beard and stove top hat, the Foundling Father tells his audience that he is a gravedigger by trade whose remarkableness lies in his resemblance to Abraham Lincoln.  

He has since committed himself to impersonating Lincoln and earns his living reciting fragmented speeches and feigning death at the hands of customers, who will pay a penny to “shoot” Lincoln in a replica of the famous booth at Ford’s Theater.   

Several do so with passion, for the therapy or thrill of involving themselves in an important American event. The effect is assertive humor as a pair of newlyweds, a couple of temperamental customers and a devoted, weekly participant briefly accept the role of John Wilkes Booth.  

All of the customers who watch and participate in the Foundling Father’s performance are of different ethnicities, and each responds to his personification of Lincoln in a different way, ranging from anger to giddiness. By presenting ethnicities other than white and black, the play seemed to offer a shoutout to minorities to which Lincoln did not pay attention during his life. At the end of a gun, the others become impossible to ignore.  

In the second act, the Foundling Father’s son, eager and awe-inspired Brazil, celebrates American history with his Hall of Wonders. Like his father, he is in the “mourning business,” digging away and adding to his display of artifacts.  

His mother Lucy, a secret-keeper for the dying, listens for whispers of truth trapped in the past. In their own ways, both of them seek, and later find, the man who left them.

The actors in “The America Play” reached into dark depths of questioning, and the show was rewarded for it.

Shewan Howard offered an admirable performance as Brazil, only too happy to leap over props, slide across the stage and dash in and out of a pit with energetic abandon.

Dawn Thomas, in the role of the far more reserved Lucy, provided a favorable counter to the hyperactivity of Howard’s character.

Nick Passafiume’s straightforward scenic design sets up location and still leaves room for the imagination. The set, the cast and the direction by Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe all came together nicely, even though Parks’s script cannot easily be neatly tied up. The two distinctive stories told in the two-hour play are unique, so each act could stand on its own. Its complexity lies in the moments in which these stories connect.  

By identifying the presence of holes in American history, “The America Play” also points out the nation’s vulnerability and raises the question: As we run away to chase the past, must the past, in turn, run to catch us?