'Home' (7 June 1981)

 

[I saw Samm-Art Williams’s Home at the Negro Ensemble Company’s new base, Theatre Four on West 55th Street, just outside the Theatre District, in June 1981.  (The date in the headline of this recovered report isn’t the date I saw the play, but the date I originally wrote up the performance.  Given that the mounting I saw closed on 14 July, I probably saw the performance shortly before the 7th, perhaps even Saturday, the 6th.)  The original report was left unfinished or the conclusion was lost somehow, leaving only a fragment, so I have tried to reconstruct it.

[C. Gerald Fraser (1925-2015), a reporter for the New York Times since 1967, wrote a column on 24 February 1980 for the Sunday “Arts and Leisure” section called “‘Home’ Is Where His Heart Is.”  It was based on an interview with playwright Samm-Art Williams, the author of Home, which had opened Off-Broadway in December to universal acclaim.  In the article, Williams revealed the origin of the play and his idea for writing it.

[Like his protagonist, Cephus Miles, the playwright’s a native North Carolinian, born in the small farming town of Burgaw, for which the fictional Cross Roads will become a stand-in.  Like Cephus, too, Williams (b. 1946) is “an admitted romantic and a lover of the soil,” reports Fraser. 

[When he talks about his hometown, his “face lights up.”  His whole family lives on the same street, and like Cephus, his grandfather has a farm just outside if town.

[Many of the people the dramatist knew back home are the models for characters in Home—he just changed their names.

[How did he come to write the play?  “First of all,” Williams begins, “I’m afraid to fly.  When I go down to North Carolina I usually take the bus.  I guess the idea really started that Christmas of 1976 when I was on a Greyhound bus going home.”

[As you’ll see, that’s precisely what Cephus Miles does after spending 13 years on the streets of a northern city like New York.  “There was nothing on that bus but black people going South at Christmastime,” Williams continued.  “I began to look at those people.  They were drinking.  They were happy.  They were glad to be going back.

[Williams, who was an actor before he turned to writing, noticed something else, too.  “But you could see a whole lot of distress.  And you knew what they had to come back North to.”

[Some years later, in an interview entitled “From Burgaw to the Blackstone: Odyssey of a hit” in the Chicago Tribune of 12 July 1981, something I wouldn’t have known about before the advent of the Internet and the availability of digitized newspaper archives from all around the country, the playwright spoke to critic-at-large Richard Christiansen (1931-2022) a few days before Home was due to open a four-week run in the Windy City, and added some details:

[“I started to wonder who they were,” Williams recalled, “what they were thinking, and what had happened to them, and I thought that would make a good poem.”  The poem morphed into a play—explaining, perhaps, where the poetic prose of the dialogue came from.

[NEC premièred Home at the St. Mark’s Playhouse in the East Village, which it occupied from 1967 to 1980.  The play opened there on 14 December 1979 and closed on 13 April 1980, accumulating 82 performances.  It transferred to Broadway’s Cort Theatre from 7 May 1980 to 4 January 1981, running for 278 performances and earning nominations for two Tony Awards (including Best Play) and two Drama Desk Awards (including Outstanding New Play).

[Following a tour beyond New York, Home returned and inaugurated NEC’s home, Theatre Four, with Samuel L. Jackson replacing Tony-nominated Charles Brown as the play’s main character, Cephus Miles.  Douglas Turner Ward, the company’s co-founder and artistic director, had taken over the direction of the Broadway run from Dean Irby and handled the staging of the revival, which played 45 performances from 8 May to 14 June 1981.

[In its 2008-09 season, devoted to NEC, the Signature Theatre mounted the most recent New York City revival at its home at the time, the Peter Norton Space on Theatre Row (West 42nd Street between 9th and 11th Avenues), between 7 December 2008 and 11 January 2009.  It was directed by Ron O. J. Parson and featured Kevin T. Carroll as Cephus Miles.]

Home, Samm-Art Williams’s poetic drama currently playing at the Negro Ensemble Company’s Theatre Four, is a moving, funny, touching, surrealistic, and, ultimately, entirely comprehensible experience.  With the judicious use of one actor and two actresses, Williams has given us the step-by-step voyage of a young man to his own contentment.  Though based strongly on the contemporary black experience, it still speaks forcefully to all of us. 

Through poetry, flashbacks, fast forward, and other thoroughly theatrical techniques, Williams and director Douglas Turner Ward develop the picaresque tale of Cephus Miles (Samuel L. Jackson), a black farmer in Cross Roads, North Carolina, from early boyhood, through a term in prison, and life “up north” in the city and, finally, back home again to his cherished “soft beautiful black sod.”  The story unfolds with humor—though it’s not a comedy—and compassion.

Playing all the other characters in Cephus’s life, from boyhood friend to girlfriend to big-city hooker, and so on, are two wonderfully inventive and versatile actresses, Juanita Mahone and Carol Lynn Maillard.  These two talented women never fail to differentiate each character, whether man or woman, adult or child, and they do so in the twinkling of an eye by adding a cap or a scarf to their basic costumes.

Cephus relates the events of his life, sometimes speaking directly to us in the house, which Jackson, Mahone, and Maillard act out for us, from a wooden rocker on the porch of the farmhouse.  Cephus is a natural-born yarn-spinner (and, it turns out, so is Jackson), and Williams provides him and us with deliciously limned episodes to conjure up the North Carolina farm country and the other locales of Cephus’s odyssey.

Covering 13 years in 90 intermissionless minutes, Williams’s tale starts where Cephus is happy, tilling the land of his small family farm.  He’s left alone to fend for himself after his Uncle Lewis dies and his childhood sweetheart, Pattie Mae Wells, takes off to go to college, marries a lawyer from the big city, and takes on airs like a society lady,

While many from the little hamlet of Cross Roads have heeded the pull of the big city and the North, Cephus has resisted.  The two women, who also serve as a Greek chorus, speak of “children of the land” and “babies of the soil” to evoke Cephus’s devotion to the homestead.

But “rich Uncle Sam” has other notions, and calls on him to fight in Vietnam, in a war about which he knows nothing.  So he refuses.  He believes, as he’d been taught by his late Gramps, that “Thou shalt not kill” and that one should “Love thy neighbor.”  

But that’s no defense in a federal courtroom, and the judge snaps, “Lock this fool up till doomsday.”  So Cephus spends five years in prison in Raleigh, sustained only by his memories of his first love, Pattie Mae (one of the roles played by Mahone).

When he gets out, he learns that someone had bought his beloved farm for back taxes.  This news prompts Cephus finally to follow the call to abandon the land,  With no home to go to, he travels north to a “very, very large American city” which is unnamed (but is clearly New York) where he’s captivated for a time by the glitz and glamour.

In the big city, Cephus falls in with a gold-digging hooker (Maillard).  When she asks where he’s from, Cephus stammers out Philadelphia (he means Pennsylvania, not Mississippi) so as not to seem such a rube.  Philly is where playwright Williams lived after he left Burgaw and before he sojourned in New York City.

But when Cephus loses his $125-a-week job because his employer finds out about his prison record and goes on welfare and then onto the streets, the tart splits, explaining sweetly as she leaves, “Where there’s no money, there can be no love . . . .”

Totally bereft, the homeless and friendless Cephus feels that God has abandoned him and “gone to Miami on vacation.”  At his lowest ebb, his aunt writes him that someone named Harper has re-purchased the farm—and put the deed in his name. 

Things have changed in the South, he’s told.  He hops a midnight bus on Christmas eve for a 15-hour ride back to Cross Roads.  Like Rip Van Winkle awakening in a new world, Cephus finds many surprises at home.  Integration has come, at least on the surface.

He discovers that the mysterious Harper who had bought his farm back is Pattie Mae.  She’d divorced her lawyer-husband but used his name for the purchase so no one would know.  She’s returned to Cross Raids, too, to rekindle the relationship with Cephus.

In the end, Cephus Miles is born again.  “Well.  You done finally come back from Miami,” he says to the Lord with a grin.

Much of the dialogue is prose poetry—Williams is adept at finding the music in words—and the set never changes from the wood-and-chicken wire construction by Felix E. Cochren that remains an ever-present reminder of the rough-hewn farmstead of Cephus’s memory—the “Home” of the play’s title. 

At bottom, Home is a rejection of novelist Thomas Wolfe’s contention that “you can’t go home again.”  The rustic, latter-day Candide does.  (He even gets his Cunegonde!)

The ending, which I could vaguely sense coming—Home is a fable, not the kind of play that will end tragically—may sound trite in a prose retelling, but Williams’s poetic rendering and his spot-on depictions—with the assistance of director Ward and the marvelous cast—of the sights, sounds, and characters of the world around Cephus, whether in rural North Carolina or the teeming streets of the northern city, in deft, evocative sketches, makes it all work touchingly. 

This fable’s moral is that we all need to reconnect with our roots, whatever they are, from time to time.  In Cephus’s—and, one presumes, Williams’s, too—“home” is the rural South, which is nurturing and healing, and “not-home” is the big-city North, which is degrading and soul-destroying.

The same’s true of the character of Cephus, who, in description, seems too idealistic to be true.  Jackson, however, plays him with such sensitivity and honesty that I accepted him as offered—a romantic with pluck.  His strength in standing up for his principles and his denial of bitterness or meanness just seem right in the context of the play.  There is such warmth and humanity in the character and performance that one just wants him to succeed.

Jackson excels in his physicality and often breaks out into a broad smile that cuts through the meaner parts of the tale as Cephus refuses to succumb to despair and defeat.  He’s less secure in his rendering of Williams more poetic dialogue, which comes out a little flat as if the actor weren’t quite sure how to handle it.

[At this point in my current play reports for Rick On Theater, I quote from a survey of published reviews.  Without the Internet, I wouldn’t have been able to do that in 1981, even had most of the original report not been lost.  I’ve decided to add a section to this post, separate from the reconstructed report, with some excerpts of the contemporary reviews.]

*  *  *  *

A SAMPLING OF REVIEWS OF HOME

[Because there were several mountings of Home after the début production, and I only saw the third iteration of the play, each one of which was accompanied by cast changes and even a change in director, I’ll stick mostly to assessments of the play and the general interpretation and overlook the performances.  (Only one New York review covered the performances I saw, and even then, only Samuel L. Jackson was in the cast the reviewer saw.)

[The coverage of Home was extensive in 1979-80, so I’ll cherry-pick a small selection of the published record.  I won’t be quoting from notices of the tour stops and I won’t review the 2008 notices.]

In the New York Amsterdam News of 19 January 1980, Lionel Mitchell said of the première production, “It is one of the most entertaining talkies,” referring, I think, to the fact that Home is a story being told by Cephus Miles as he and the two actresses act out scenes of his life.  (This was the opening cast of Charles Brown, L. Scott Caldwell, and Michele Shay.)

Mitchell compared Samm-Art Williams’s play to Under Milk Wood, the 1954 radio drama by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.  He dubs it “a charming, enjoyable, very entertaining play.” 

Mel Gussow, in the New York Times of 20 December 1979, labeled Home “a freshet of good will, a celebration of the indomitability of man, a call to return to the earth.  In all respects—writing, direction and performance—this is one of the happiest theatrical events of the season.”

Of Williams’s dramaturgy, the Timesman observed:

The author is also an actor, although not in his own play, and the same easygoing ebullience that he brings to the stage as a performer is the fountain of his playwright's energy.  For one thing, Mr. Williams is clearly in love with words, which in his hands become a rolling caravan of images.  Occasionally, he stops for rhyming interludes, talking blues, which remind one somewhat of Vachel Lindsay’s tympanic incantations.  More often, with his gift for local language, Mr. Williams seems closer to the spirit of Mark Twain.  If Twain were black and from North Carolina, he might have written like Samm‐Art Williams.

(For those too young to get the reference to Vachel Lindsay [1879-1931], he was a well-known poet considered a founder of modern singing poetry, as he referred to it, in which verses are meant to be sung or chanted.  1915’s “The Congo” is probably his best-known poem, full of onomatopoeia and words that evoke sounds.)

“‘Home,’” summed up Gussow, “is an uplifting folk ballad about the pure in heart.  Welcome ‘Home.’”

“Samm-Art Williams’ play is sweet, simple, funny and endearing,” wrote Douglas Watt in the New York Daily News on 20 December 1979, “a holiday parable, a good-humored, 90-minute myth.”

“Williams, though he is not averse to cliches about black life and behavior, is a disarming fellow,” averred Watt, “and his gossamer evening with its snatches of doggerel and inside ethnic jokes not too far inside to elude the public at large, is both entertaining and inspiriting.” 

The Daily News reviewer added that “it would not be out of place for ‘Home’ to break into song, and even dance, at appropriate moments.  Or, for that matter, for the audience to do so, as the other night’s gave indication of being ready to.”

In Variety on 23 January 1980, Madd. (the reviewing “sig,” or pseudonym, for John Madden) opens his notice with the observation:

Whoever believes that “you can’t go home again” hasn’t seen . . . “Home,” a splendid play . . ., vibrant with warmth, wit, humor and superb acting, with poetic, gutsy writing that can be counted among the best theatrical events of the season. 

Madden felt, “Although Williams, in his depiction of black life and its ethnic influences, obviously ‘tells it like it is’ judging from the enthusiastic response of the mostly black audience at the performance caught, anyone who grew up ethnic can relate to the play’s vision.”

When the play reopened in Broadway’s Cort Theatre, it was re-reviewed by both the Times and the Daily News, but as both notices were by the same writers as the reviews of the St. Mark’s mounting, I’ll start with a different paper and reviewer, Allan Wallach of Long Island’s Newsday.

On 8 May 1980, Wallach characterized Home as “a likeable play.”  Williams, he found, “can make you share his warm feelings toward the play’s land-loving hero and the down-home southern life of farming and fish fries.”

Wallach had a complaint, though:

Unlike a lot of plays that need trimming, however, the hour-and-a-half, intermission-less ‘Home’ could profit from some added length.  Williams has written it with the simplicity of a fable, and more character development and interaction would help.  The people in Cephus Miles’ life . . . come and go so quickly we hardly get to know them.  And some of the play is taken up with patches of writing that strain a bit too hard to be lyrical.

The Newsday writer pointed out that the 13 years covered by the plot “is probably too much to cram into a short play.  But Williams tells his story engagingly.” 

In the Philadelphia Inquirer issue of 8 May 1980, William B. Collins deemed that Home “implies that urban blacks have a strong nostalgia for the southern soil of their roots.”  In the first (and, ultimately only) negative review of the play I found in my survey, Collins continued:

Playwright Samm-Art Williams himself succumbed to this yearning with a drama that merely translates into terms of the black experience, the stale notion of the superiority of country values over city ways.  Rural is good, big town is bad, according to the trite world view from the stage of the Cort.

The Inquirer reviewer admitted to a “sketchy understanding of the reverse migration” between North and South, but contended “that the migrants are more likely to be middle-class professionals to whom doors have indeed opened in the New South rather than unskilled laborers seeking fulfillment in pig husbandry.”

In other words, Collins, white and middle-aged, thought Williams was mythologizing.  He added:

If “Home” is questionable sociology, it is also the blandest kind of drama.  It is written in a “poetic” style that casts two women as Greek chorus, commenting on the turns that Cephus Miles’ life takes.  The poetry is embarrassingly bad and the women irritatingly strident.

The review-writer’s issues with Home didn’t end there.  He found the character of Cephus “an uncommonly literate fellow, considering his background.  There had never been any dirt under those fingernails.  He sounds country only when spinning yarns . . . .”

Collins praises the direction of Douglas Turner Ward faintly, reporting that he “has staged the play in his characteristically vigorous, forthright manner,” but condemns Felix E. Cochren’s “all-purpose unit setting that fails to serve any particular purpose very well.”

Jay Sharbutt, reviewing for the Asbury Park Press on the Jersey Shore, noted the past Broadway successes of the producing team of Elizabeth I. McCann and Nelle Nugent.  On 9 May 1980, Sharbutt declared, “Now they’ve got another winner—'Home.’”

The Press review-writer described the play as “[r]ich in humanity and humor.”  Sharbutt cautioned, however, “It must be said that ‘Home’ . . . seems an oh-oh proceeding when it begins.  You tend to say ‘Oh oh,’ and suspect you’re trapped in an epic poem of more epic pretense.”

“But if you just roll with it, let your mind relax,” the reviewer backed off a little, “you’re in for a wonderful evening that jumps with life and energy, despite author Samm-Art Williams’ sporadic flights into poetic excess.”

Williams, Sharbutt felt, “has a superb knack of capturing in quick, sharp sketches, the sights, sounds and characters of black life, whether at a catfish fry at a North Carolina riverbank or on the mean streets of New York.”  He added that Home “is the McCoy, richly evocative, as they say, and laced with sly ruminations, such as this from Brown as he boards his bus for a 15-hour trip back to Cross Roads.”

“There’s a predictably upbeat end to the troubles of this down-home Job,” Sharbutt found.  “But even that grave flaw—for these times, anyway—is forgiven . . . .”  He concluded that “‘Home’ has the right stuff.  It’ll decorate your mind.  It has no intermission, but doesn’t need one.  It moves that fast, that enjoyably.”

Cliches conjured up by Samm-Art Williams’ “Home” are[:] there’s no place like home, something to write home about, home is where the heart is, I’ll be home for Christmas[,] et al.  But “Home” is no apparition.  It is live, unadulterated drama that hits home hard.

That’s now Marie Moore opened her review of the Broadway presentation of Home in the 17 May 1980 Amsterdam News.  She reports, “The conveyors of ‘Home’ skillfully deliver threatre-goers to Cross Roads, North Carolina, a prison in Raleigh, N.C., New York City and back to Cross Roads, all in a 13-year time span.  The audience is oblivious to time and space when the talented three take command on stage.”

As if to respond to Allan Wallach’s complaint in Newsday, Moore asserted, “Like an epic poem, ‘Home’ is punctuated with heroic figures but enhanced by its brevity.  The 90-minute story-narrative lush with lyrical language is a compressed stick of theatrical dynamite.”

Her concluding comments are indeed high praise:

Broadway has finally gotten a sensitive, poignant play, minus the frivolous trappings, but full of superior talent to match “Home’s” theatrical opulence.

“Home” is an exciting, exhilarating evening full of laughter and tears.  See it now.  No doubt “Home’s” next hearth is Hollywood—where most of the monumental movies are made.”

The Daily World, then New York’s Marxist newspaper, ran the only review I found of Home’s return to Off-Broadway on 27 May 1981—and even then it had a different cast, except Jackson, than the company I saw in August.

Extolling the NEC for proving “that you can’t get too much of a good thing,” review-writer Elizabeth Bowman proclaimed, “Their new revival of Home by Samm-Art Williams is truly theater at its most rewarding, combining comedy and tragedy and with a surprisingly happy ending.”

“Samuel L. Jackson . . . skillfully conveys to us the “boy-next-door” qualities of the character,” reported Bowman—the only member of the cast I saw who got a review that I found—“his idealism and his strength in standing up for his ideals, as well as his refusal to become mean and bitter, despite all the undeserved troubles that befall him.”

In conclusion, the Daily World reviewer affirmed, “There are no dull moments in this play, and I left the theater feeling happy and hopeful.” 

[Coincidentally, the Chicago Trib interview from which I quoted in my introduction also answered an entirely irrelevant question I’ve had about Samm-Art Williams ever since I became aware of him: where did his unusual first name come from?  It turns out that it evolved much the same way as my stage name did.

[The dramatist, who had started out to become an actor, explained that when he went to Actors’ Equity, the stage actors’ union, to get his membership card, he found out that he wouldn’t be able to join under his birth name, Samuel Arthur Williams.  There was already an Equity member named Sammy Williams, the woman in the membership department told him, and Equity doesn’t permit two members to have the same or similar names.

[The woman told him he’d have to change his name for professional use and suggested Henry Williams.  The would-be union actor rejected that because he didn’t want people to think he was Hank Williams, the country singer, and after wrangling with the membership lady for a time, he wrote down Samm-Art Williams, and that’s who he became—even when the incipient actor became the successful playwright.

[Oh, and my own tale is much the same—except my first union was AFTRA, the TV union (now half of the merged SAG-AFTRA).  I couldn’t be registered as Richard for the same reason the writer couldn’t be Samuel—there was already a Richard K***** on the books.  So I took my initials, R. E., and turned them into a name, Ari, and that’s who I was during my short, illustrious career as an actor.]