April 13--In many dramatic works about race in modern-day America, the heinous institution of chattel slavery is seen as the original American sin, the moment when a decision was made by human beings to chain others of their kind, to sell them like cattle, to rend child from parent, to destroy families and to kill off any semblance of mutual human dignity.
When you watch, say, the works of August Wilson, you feel his certainty that America's ongoing racial agony -- played out in every decade of the 20th century and now into the 21st -- stems from that founding sin. In these tellings, slavery is seen as the American beginning.
So what's immediately striking about Marcus Gardley's very ambitious new play at Victory Gardens Theater, "An Issue of Blood," is the time and place of its setting: Virginia in 1676, an era before the peak of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, before the mass legalization of slavery in the English colonies and, of course, a century before American independence.
Gardley, a writer who lives much of the time in Chicago, is writing of an era when indentured servants, immigrants of varying races but common poverty, arrived in the New World with an obligation to pay off their passage. Some of these former indentured servants thrived in the New World -- there was one real-life man, a former Angolan named Anthony Johnson, who became a successful tobacco farmer and even owned slaves of his own.
In Gardley's play, we meet Negro Mary (Lizan Mitchell), a woman with roots in Barbados who has risen to the point that she effectively owns two of her workers, Nova and Dozens Goode (E. Faye Butler and Cleavant Derricks). Negro Mary also has a son, John Israel First (Tosin Morohunfola), whom she has sent off to London to gain an education. He has returned a sophisticated fellow with an interest in a young, indentured Irishwoman, Celia (played by Eleni Pappageorge), who thinks of John as a great catch and who sees his prospects rather than his race, which was not untypical in 1676.
But in the middle of the play, John encounters a white constable (played by Steve O'Connell) who does not care about his prospects, only his race.
For in that year, the whole system of indentured servitude was beginning to break down, with owners figuring out that they were losing their best workers just as those workers acquired skills, and that it would be far more profitable just to own them. One indentured servant already had been turned into a slave by the courts after he had tried to run away and, of course, history reveals what happened next, with a long line stretching all the way to Ferguson, Mo., some 300 odd years later.
But Gardley's play, directed by Chay Yew, captures a moment when it might all have been different, when a man like Israel could have been seen as a leader of a new country on its way to greatness. At the same time, he gives his work a real feeling of dread, affording Nova Cassandra-like qualities of seeing and feeling the future to come. Negro Mary is not so gifted and turns out to be more vulnerable than she thinks.
This is a new play that could use some work -- the story has some muddiness in places and there is a sense of anachronism throughout that functions well at times, but not as well at other moments. Gardley strains to make the connection to the current moment in America when, in fact, his characters and story need no such help, just as long as they reveal themselves to us with more clarity and passion; great parables rarely need internal explication. The production is very solidly directed (Yew makes it very clear how much is at stake), but some of it seems rushed and needs more room to breathe.
Nonetheless, "An Issue of Blood" is an engaging, distinctive and committed work. Honest conversations about class in America are much rarer these days, even than conversations about race, a defect Gardley yet might further correct. Already, though, this fine writer offers a rare look at a moment when a country not yet a country might have gone in another direction. America could have valued its hardest workers and greatest talents and begun independence on a note of inclusion, rather than making indented servitude a state that, for some, was something devoutly to be wished, being as it came with an end.
cjones5@tribpub.com
REVIEW: An Issue of Blood at Victory Gardens Theater
3 STARS
When: Through May 3
Where: Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln Ave.
Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes
Tickets: $15-$60 at 773-871-3000 or victorygardens.org
