‘Bondage’ fearlessly all about liberation
Nothing stifles the righteous black rage of Star Finch’s “Bondage.” Her slave characters don’t have to be so superhumanly good that they let their wrath melt into mercy. Her white slaveholding characters never magically pull an about-face and see the error of their ways.
AlterTheater’s production, whose encore run opened Sunday, Jan. 14, at ACT’s Costume Shop after being performed in Corte Madera in early 2017, doesn’t coddle white anxieties, or cop to any of the nefarious unwritten rules playwrights are supposed to bend to if they want a play about race to get produced. White people commit atrocities, and their black victims, for a change, get to mete out justice — both in no uncertain terms.
Directed by Elizabeth Cart-
er, the drama thrills, partly because it’s still so rare to see genuine bravery in theatrical depictions of race, partly because Finch has such a singular mode of expression. “Bondage” centers on two young teenagers on an island plantation: Zuri (Dezi Solèy), the mixed-race slave of her white cousin, Emily (Emily Serdahl). Though on the cusp of womanhood, the two have retained much of the idiom of their childhood, speaking with a frankness — “Do you ever wish you were born white, Zuri?” — that both disarms in its innocence and, in Emily’s case, alarms in its blindness.
True to the language of youth, there’s a caper in the pair’s discourse, a flitting dance from realworld concerns to the imaginary and and then back down to earth again. For them, the magical world is the real world — a woman’s menses seems to arrive by supernatural decree, so why couldn’t an egg or a piece of “secret-wish cake” or costume for make-believe have special powers as well?
It’s Zuri’s lot, though, to be forced out of the innocence Emily can keep (and maybe always will keep, even as an adult) — to have to understand the longings of her master Philip (Shane Fahy); the warnings of Azucar (Cathleen Riddley), the other house slave; the dangers posed by the arrival of Emily’s harsh, suspicious Aunt Ruby (Emilie Talbot). As the girls’ chatter darts back and forth from the empirical to the surreal, they are always, always jockeying for power — and Carter’s cast is hyper-attuned to the way each new breath shifts the balance. Zuri leads with her greater understanding; then Emily, as Zuri’s mistress, has an internal trump card, but one that can’t get her what she wants — the impossible love that’s always, only on an oppressor’s terms, that arises from a child’s need and a child’s limitations.
Everything is so redolent in the haunted plantation of “Bondage” that it feels like, were you to lift a trunk lid or open a jar of jam, a swirl of shadowy spirits would fly out, merging with the jagged silhouetted branches of Jen Brault and Margaret Belton’s “space design.” If the show has any flaw, it’s that the world of the play is so built out, so expansive as to occasionally dilute its focus — some of the ghosts and charms that the script hints will be important turn out to be red herrings or just part of the backdrop.
A few dead ends, though, are a small price to pay for finely calibrated performances and poetic, sly and courageous playwriting.