‘Hot Links’ sizzles with racial tension
There’s safety in the familiar, right? It’s 1955. Seven men gather to share stories and drink beer in Charlesetta’s coloreds-only roadside bar, a rough-cut place out in the woods somewhere in East Texas. They jostle, banter and bicker. They pick at each other, occasionally opening old wounds and coming to blows. Then, they drink some more, sharing their wisdom and laughter, distrust and fear.
It’s a small community. The spot is Hilltop, suggesting a kind of safety, like a hilltop fort. But it’s dark out there, and the world is full of white men who have always had things their own way. Who knows what might be brewing?
We don’t know, but we’re busy getting to know the hothead, the professor, the one who preaches the gospel of benevolence and the one with a shotgun whose buttons you don’t want to push. There’s the gambling man with second sight, and the youngster who thinks he’s going to get out of town. It’s a rich stew of characters, revealed in a torrent of talk.
Gradually the atmosphere tightens. All that back-and-forth hasn’t been entirely random. Amid gritty and sometimes raw talk of the Bible, blues, the land they work, food (how much of the pig do you eat?), women and dreams, we hear about the big highway construction that’s been providing jobs but also some suspicious deaths. We’re all just links in the food chain, blind Adolph says, which is one way to understand those hot links of the title.
Clearly the bar isn’t just a haven. In 1955, backwoods Texas is still firmly in the shadow of Jim Crow, and black lives don’t matter much. It’s not surprising to hear that the Klan is meeting out there in the forest this very night. A note is delivered. Phone calls are made. The outer world looms.
The play seems to meander, but real time marches on, and everything happens in just 90 minutes, the amount of time it takes to act it out on stage.
I can’t say more, because I want to leave you the thrill of discovery. Unless the Royal Shakespeare Company brings its whole repertory to town, “East Texas Hot Links” is going to rank among the 10 best plays of the year. It’s an intense experience in an intimate theater, acted with compelling-authenticity.
If August Wilson had followed some of his characters back to their ancestral homes in the South, he might have found a story like this. “East Texas” also could have shown up as one of those stories told by a Wilson character in a jitney station or diner. It’s not that Mr. Lee’s writing is derivative, but that he has gone to the same sources Mr. Wilson plumbed, the memories of life lived at the sufferance of others, of bonding together and splintering apart, of being continually on guard.
The other parallels to Mr. Wilson are the swing and heft of the language, as well as the dramaturgy, in which apparently aimless talk generates a rhythm of tension, release and then greater tension-release until there’s nowhere else to go.
Mr. Lee is from Texas, but he arrives at Mark Southers’ Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre in a season of playwrights with Pittsburgh connections. Mr. Lee’s is mainly as an actor, at both Pittsburgh Playwrights and at Pittsburgh Public Theater, where he played August Wilson. Last year the Post-Gazette named him Performer of the Year for “Between Riverside and Crazy.”
His play’s Pittsburgh vibe is raised by its director, Montae Russell, a Homestead native also better known as an actor, who appeared in the New York premiere of this same play back in 1994. You can’t tell this is Mr. Russell’s debut as a stage director: He has the play wound up like a spinning top.
But mostly, “East Texas” depends on its experienced Pittsburgh cast of eight, most of whom have acted together many times, as the result shows. It really justifies that overused word, ensemble.
My favorite performance is Charles Timbers as the self-possessed Boochie, who can see the future. But Jonathan Berry energizes the story as the jittery XL, running up against Monteze Freeland’s lovelorn Roy and Sam Lothard’s quick-to-the-trigger Buckshot. Leslie Howard presides as Adolph, the blind autodidact, and Kevin Brown tries to smooth the waters as the benevolent Columbus (“I got all that I need and most of what I want”). The wild card is Taylor Martin Moss as the young Delmus, who has a honey and big plans. Presiding is Cheryl El-Walker’s Charlesetta, quick to serve a beer or grab her baseball bat.
Are they all what they seem? Of course not.
What an invigorating evening! If you’ve never been to this small third-floor theater across from the August Wilson Center, this is a good time to take the plunge.