AN INTIMATE INTRODUCTION TO CLASSICAL MUSIC

Walking into the Barton family’s dining room—like that of most any immigrant family—amounts to entering a warzone. Joseph, the Bartons’ patriarch, is already armed. He speaks like a highbrow hitman with a manifesto tied to his coat and a razor stuffed in his mouth, with which he spits orders and barbs in the faces of his children. He figured out long ago that within a foreign country there’s no abasement worse than being pitied. And an emasculated tyrant like him, having just returned from the hospital after a car crash, can’t risk humiliation any more than a scalpel can risk an inch. So when Eustace, their tenement’s newest arrival from the South, interrupts his homecoming dinner, over which daughter Annetta had presided, to incite, “I’d like your permission to call on Mistress ‘Netta here,” he can start carving their graves. The base of Joseph’s worth rests in that which he believes other Black men have recklessly disowned: obeying a code. His is the Garveyite code, stripped to its naked fury. “So you want to reach upward for the stars and drag one down,” replies Joseph to Eustace, “Drag it to earth with you and your kind.”

Like in the family dramas of Albee and Hansberry that came a decade before him, Steve Carter’s 1976 family feud, Eden, witnesses a father’s rebuttal to the trial of his own psychic castration. Carter finds the hellmouth of our perpetual crises of displacement, separation, and integration away from our Southern border or the headlines and instead on nebbish homes like the Bartons’, where the blur between external and internal threats is mere daily life when choked by the yoke of marriage and immigration. “You’re not Negroes, you're not colored,” reminds Annetta (Lauren F. Walker) to her siblings, mimicking her father, in Brandon J. Dirden’s revival of Eden at the Yale Rep, which closed last week, “you're Edenites, for you come from Eden. There would be no pale-faced people had not an Edenite woman in her folly wished upon the pale moon.” But what the members of the Barton family learn throughout the play is that when they call home, no one answers.

Alongside Joseph (Russell G. Jones) and her sullen mother, Florie (Christina Acosta Robinson), Annetta lives with her older sister Agnes (Alicia Pilgrim), and younger brothers, Nimrod (Juice Mackins) and Solomon (Prentiss Patrick-Carter) in a small well-kept but hard-boiled apartment, the kind of place where there’s hardly any windows but always too much sun. Akin to other plays about the Great Migration and its political pitfalls that the Negro Ensemble Company’s heyday produced, much of what needs to be understood in Dirden’s Eden can be gleaned from the characters’ locutions (leavened by vocal coach Paul Pryce’s priming), a range from the creole-tinged lyricism of their fictional Caribbean homeland to a meek, imitated Southern grammar, all indicating fluctuating models of diasporic nationality. “Can’t you try to speak properly?,” demands Agnes from her brothers, “Honestly, you two get more American every day.” “We are Americans,” corrects Nimrod, “We were born here, remember? You and Annetta is the monkey chasers.” Solomon piles on: “Monkey chasers! Coconut eaters! Sugar cane suckers!” Humiliation, dispossession, indifference—dialects of the same mother tongue. In the name of Marcus Garvey’s promise of a transatlantic utopia in Africa, Joseph must corral these variant strains of American madnesses and purify them: sawing their hearts and minds open to rinse them in snow.

It’s this filial captivity that pushes Annetta away. Whereas Agnes has workplace potential and their brothers must be men someday, Annetta—a doe-eyed girl-next-door trope, which Walker counters with a tenuous, introspective angst—must be the family servant. Joseph assigns her to be their neighbor’s future child bride to save himself the embarrassment of a Black American marrying into the family. When she finally gets her private moment with her valentine, Eustace (Chaundre Hall-Broomfield), we find them high up, on a roof that slopes above the stage, blushes blooming between the moonlight and the clothesline. Carter’s wily words release something physical when voiced through Hall-Broomfield, whose suspenders are stretched thin in constraining his perky, almost delightfully effeminate, freneticism. Even when his persistence yanks your throat, he’s delighting you. Often it’s only the deep lines in his forehead and his automatic scowl that show that he has suffered. In coming North, he has escaped not only the turpitude of a lynching cult but also the shadow of his mother’s death, which bears the imprint of his hands. For whatever the play’s text lacks in coherent meet-cute, Walker and Hall-Broomfield make up for it by drawing from these family ghosts to color their scenes together alone with the duskiness of heavy-scented roses.

Alongside this mawkish romanticism, the rest of the ensemble’s embrace of Carter’s bittersweet resignations and Freudian slips round out this production’s tragicomic bent. But Eden isn’t merely about race, or love, or how race colors the pursuit of love, but also about how love makes you a target, especially for the people whom you can’t—in your youth—choose to not love. She flaunts to Eustace the scars produced by Joseph’s beatings, symbolic of her father’s affection but also proud proof of her unyielding devotion to her lover. To Annetta, these contradictory attachments are one and the same. In clinging to the myth that love can quell her lust for identity and individuality, she may be just as trapped by ideology as her father.

Inspired by Carter’s own childhood in San Juan Hill, in which his Trinidadian-born grandfather's own racial purism pushed the playwright’s Southern-bred father out of their home, Carter set Eden in the summer of 1927, mere months before President Coolidge stipulated Marcus Garvey’s deportation. Despite the pleated skirts and top hats, though, Carter wasn’t alluding to a faraway past. By 1976, when Eden premiered off-Broadway, the aftershocks of Black nationalist movements and their intraracial and interethnic tensions also concerned the literature of Ishmael Reed, Sonia Sanchez, and Paule Marshall. Within the era’s canonical Black theater, Carter’s kitchen sink dramas differed from the myth-bending confessionalism of Adrienne Kennedy or Ntozake Shange, but also from the masculinist, get-whitey tradition of the Amiri Baraka-founded Black Arts Movement. Carter’s study of Black chauvinism and national identities with no national belongings aimed away from the oft-patriarchal notions of this militant period and toward a backhanded self-criticism free of agenda or abdication.

Nimrod expects assimilation. Agnes won’t ignore her difference. Solomon resides in the middle. Annetta lives in the hope for a Pan-African indifference. Yet, somehow, it’s Joseph who needs a home. What Joseph must admire in Garvey is that he—the most prominent Caribbean emigrant in the U.S. during the 1920s, leader of the early Back-to-Africa movement, and occasional ally to the KKK’s mutual goal of racial separatism, akin to the Nation of Islam’s hospitality some decades later to the American Nazi Party—has located the truth beneath all truths, a desire that spoils the rest. Garvey viewed Africa as Joseph could never view his own family. Underneath Garvey’s portrait, the centerpiece of their home, Joseph seems to know, despite the family ties before him, that he has never married, never had children. He is neither husband, worker, nor father. He is Africa, and Africa will become him too. Carter dooms him with the patrician language of politics, also known as the parlance of madness:

JOSEPH: Marcus was toppled by a power far greater, far greener, far whiter, far Blacker than any there could be in those heavens above, and before our ship of hope could sail, it sank into chasms far deeper than the deepest abyss. A few of us tried a resurrection but to no avail. The harpoons had been driven in securely and did their work. We ran into walls of Black indifference and contented ignorance. We are trapped in this land with a people who were almost ours. People who when the water got hot preferred to leap from the kettle. That's why I cannot relax.

In crafting a villain whose convictions are so predictably unshakable, the test of a play like Eden is in building suspense even when we already know the ending, raising the stakes within an universe in which even characters foresee the casualties. Florie, whose familial martyrdom is not so much a triumph of grit as it is a tragic, trivial test of female complacency, has long understood that her husband’s dogma will be the reason she will have to bury her own children, in funerals he might skip. The Yale Rep’s theater is small enough that you could breathe the embers burning within her. At her most incensed, during the second act, she invites Joseph to strike her, lamenting Annetta’s fate, the same as hers: doomed to be a “prisoner in a bed with a man you designate as substitute because—before God, whom you fear despite what you say—you can't be in that bed yourself!” But it’s already too late and deep down she knows, crowding out her hopelessness with pleas, hiding the sun with her thumb. There might be something more painful than burying your children. Burying your future.

In the final chapters of the play, Eustace and Annetta, through Florie’s collusion, return to the Barton home expecting a child. Joseph reacts once again with violence but this time he’s afflicted by a stroke, which leaves him wheelchair-bound and mute. His destiny, of course, we had already guessed. It appears like the likeliest result of a Black man’s perversion of his relationship with his own people and his frantic search for self-love in an indifferent world. Joseph verges on one-dimensional caricature, but Carter, instead, depolarizes his grandfather’s shadow, letting Joseph’s agony match his ambitions. His life depends on revolutionary militancy—as it should—but the litany of artillery he could choose from was always going to turn on himself.

“Look out that window,” screams Joseph in one of his tirades, “and hear the frantic bleatings of those with the razor scars across their cheeks. They are in, as you call it, love!” It takes Annetta exchanging one trap of domesticity for another to cling closer to her father’s sermons, seeking home away from Eustace in a paralyzed Joseph during Eden’s final scene: “Can’t you help me? … I guess no one can help me now. I’m married.” In the name of love, Annetta is willing to bear the unforgivable and, even worse, she forgives. That's the tragedy here. Love, not the unforgivable. God knows how little forgiveness there is in love. She wonders throughout the play how much she can stand having other people speak for her. Yet it is the moment of rawest silence that dilates this question the most: having discovered Annetta’s affair, Joseph shoves her into the bedroom and whips her wildly, while in the dining room Florie soothes Agnes’ shrieks with a brutal slap and a rabid hug. In the squint-eyed darkness that ensued, the theater shuddered in silence, which hovered around us like falling timber. Who answers the daughters’ death wishes? Who speaks after such a dangerous silence? Escaping it would require some insolence, maybe vengeance. Even love.

Familial Love: Review of Eden by Yale Rep

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