Sweetness eases edge in ‘Bitter Earth’
Early in “This Bitter Earth,” the sound of a glass bottle shattering interrupts a silly, drunken, late-night walk home. It’s not that ominous at first, but as lovers Jesse (H. Adam Harris) and Neil (Michael Hanna) periodically repeat the scene over the course of Harrison David Rivers’ play, it becomes clear that that sound — that out-ofnowhere but decisive sound — will restructure everything, into the time before the glass bottle and the time after it.
With that realization comes dread, which registers all the more sharply because Jesse and Neil’s charm, as individuals, as a couple, practically oozes off the stage of New Conservatory Theatre Center
(where I saw the world premiere Thursday, Oct. 5, and where, full disclosure, I worked as a fundraiser in 2015-16). Jesse, a black playwright, is simultaneously regal in self-assurance and piteous in his self-loathing, and Harris, whose speech carries a tremulous inborn melody, sets Jesse’s every carefully chosen word afloat like it’s a treasure in a precarious position.
Hanna’s Neil, a white Black Lives Matter activist, brims over with squirrelly energy that’s always looking for an outlet, preferably either sex or a fiery political speech. He’s perhaps at his best, though, when he’s in mock surprise at Jesse’s wry barbs or princely self-regard. His jaw might be agape, as if to communicate shock, but there’s a smile in his eyes that’s lapping it all up.
The dread in “This Bitter Earth” doesn’t feel quite right, not just because these young men are adorable, but because Rivers’ script, directed by Ed Decker, seems to want to go in another direction. Neil can devote his life to activism in large part because he’s wealthy and doesn’t have to work. He can also enter into that draining, frustrating and often dangerous line of work without a lifetime of racial hurt and injustice already sapping his energy.
Jesse, by contrast, eschews most public displays of political protest — the placards, the strategy meetings, the bus trips to support rallies elsewhere, all of which are manna for Neil. For Jesse, Neil’s activism is largely an effort to assuage his white guilt. For Jesse, simply living his life and making his art are legitimate, and powerful, means of resistance, particularly in a world that lets only white men be “soft” and “artistic” and “gentle.” For black men, Jesse says, “maybe gentle gets you killed.”
Yet each time Rivers starts to get into the thick of whether each man — and each of us — is doing enough to resist or to examine privileges, a scene ends, and it’s back to cutesy teasing, the spats of foreplay. A provocative line like “You know you accuse me of my white guilt, but what about your apathy?” ought to merit a whole scene, perhaps even a whole new play, rather than a mere “I have rehearsals” and some blasting of Nina Simone before the blackout. Does Neil accuse everyone in his life — his superrich parents, for example — of similar apathy, demanding that they, too, take up arms? Or does he make those requirements only of the young black men in his life?
If “This Bitter Earth” doesn’t examine all its themes as fully as it might, it deserves kudos for raising them in the first place, particularly at a time when almost all of us, including Neil, could be doing more to resist the forces of bigotry — and to interrogate how our own privileges, in education, race, affluence and more, both enable us and demand that we fight.