GLR January-February 2023

THEATER

When Heritage and Personhood Collide

“A RE YOU a Mitchell man, or are you a fag got?” demands a father, shouting in the face of his teenage son. It’s a chilling, heartbreak ing question that’s repeated throughout Terry Guest’s new play, The Magnolia Bal let, Part 1 . The work by the Chicago-based

bining dance, poetry, percussion and spec tacle. The language is musical and com pelling. Marsae Mitchell’s choreography tells a haunting story through such moments as a ring shout in which actors in chains dance on a slave ship, or Ezekiel giving his son a haircut. The set is in ghostly colors with timbers framing a house, somewhat

B RIDGETTE M. R EDMAN

THE MAGNOLIA BALLET, PART I by Terry Guest Williamston Theatre, Michigan

askew, bordered by hanging moss. Wooden planks compose the stage floor with a hole in the middle representing the waters of the marsh that the Mitchells live on. Each element, along with the light, sound, and props, works in tandem to heighten the po etry of the play, the intensity of the story being told. Guest raises many questions and only hints at answers. What does it mean to be Black and queer? Is it possible to escape the heavy chains of history? Can a white boy ever truly love a Black boy without acknowledging and understanding white su premacy? While it can be painful to watch at times—and the deliberate use of such slurs as “nigger” and “faggot” intention ally causes discomfort—it is ultimately a story of love between a father and son. The Magnolia Ballet is an intensely American, intensely human story told with great poetry and compelling imagery. As for the demand of the father to his son, Guest provides his take on whether one must choose between a mythic heritage and ac ceptance of one’s sexuality and personhood. Continued from page 50 his existence. Sitting on a beach in Provincetown, he vents an grily to Aaron that he always had to work harder than his lazy, straight coworkers in order prove himself “perfect.” The pre vailing point of Bobby’s outburst is that he grew up, like so many LGBT people, starving for representation on screen and good gay guys to emulate. Even the good-natured but shallow Aaron is made a teensy bit anxious by Bobby’s laundry list of resentments, so, like any good boyfriend, he begins to dance around in order to lighten the mood. Another provocative idea buried in the script by Eichner and co-writer Nicholas Stoller is that all romantic love is not the same, which flies in the face of the love-is-love mantra that LGBT folks often espouse. The awkward sex scenes bear out this idea when Bobby and Aaron wrestle in their underwear, sniff poppers, and end up with post-coital grins to match. The other board members with whom Bobby works also bang their fists on the table and insist that while love is a good thing, love is about as subjective as it gets. The idea that gay romance is not your father’s form of romance rears its head one last time when Aaron’s brother (played by former Queer Eye for the Straight Guy host Jai Ro driguez) comforts him during his brief breakup from Bobby. “My story is not your story,” Jason chides Aaron. Only time will tell whether Bros finds its long-lost family on the small screen or re mains the proverbial red-headed stepchild. Bros

playwright who grew up in the South is a lyrical, tightly chore ographed play that’s getting a rolling world premiere. It opened in Chicago in early 2022, had a second showing at Williamston Theatre in Michigan in October, and will get a third premiere in Detroit in June 2023. The latter two productions are sharing a director, technical staff and two of the four actors. The Williamston production was stunning, leaving many in the audience clearly affected as they gave the ninety-minute show a standing ovation. Guest, himself a gay Black man, has written a play that makes no apologies or accommodations to polite sensibilities, and he isn’t concerned with making those who are uncomfortable any less so. Set in modern-day Georgia, the action moves back and forth through the generations, as far back as the slave ship that brought over the Mitchells’ ancestors. The young Ezekiel Mitchell, re ferred to as Z, knows that he’s gay and is trying to figure out how to make that work in the world he inhabits. He cannot tell his very macho, emotionally distant father, and even his would be lover insists that the sex they have doesn’t make him gay. Four actors tell the story, often taking on multiple characters and often addressing the audience directly. Stefon Funderburke is Z, a self-confident young man who is earnest and eloquent, even if he often struggles to communicate with his father. Scott Norman plays the father, Ezekiel, a man who cannot, his son explains, show physical affection because his father could not show physical affection, because his father could not do so, be cause for his father it was not safe to do so. But Norman infuses him with a highly animated physicality, telling the story with his entire body to reveal a man who clearly loves his son but is stuck in a place of toxic masculinity that he learned as a sur vival strategy. Norman also takes on the role of the white su premacist father to Z’s best friend Danny Mitchell—the two families share a last name, indicating that one may once have owned the other. He tells the audience that he knows they’re going to struggle to suspend disbelief and see a Black man play ing a white character. Timothy Hackbarth plays Danny Mitchell, the pot-smoking teenage descendent of a line of white su premacists, who’s here to remind us that white supremacy is not a historic relic. Jesse Boyd-Williams poetically played the role of the play’s ghosts, apparitions that embody the past and demonstrate how the haunting gaze of history powerfully af fects the current generation. The Magnolia Ballet leans hard into its theatricality, com Bridgette M. Redman is an independent arts writer and travel journalist.

January–February 2023

49