E-Mail This Article to a Friend Gem in the rough (continued)

By now, everyone has read of the difficulties that have beset the Broadway-bound production that arrived at the Huntington tugging its powerhouse cast. First, director Marion McClinton, a long-time Wilson collaborator, had to withdraw because of illness and was replaced by Kenny Leon, who helmed both the fine Huntington rendering of A Raisin in the Sun (among other productions) and the recent, Tony-winning Broadway revival. Following the director shift, Tony nominee (for Joe Turner) Delroy Lindo left the show because of "creative differences." He was replaced as Solly by Chisholm, who had played the part in both the play’s Chicago debut and a subsequent Los Angeles refining. Eugene Lee stepped into the background role of Solly’s Underground Railroad colleague and Aunt Ester’s gatekeeper, Eli, which Chisholm was to have played.

As all of this was going on, and as a perusal of a script revised last July makes clear, Wilson has continued to rewrite, sometimes to the play’s detriment. It is interesting to note that in some Wilson works, for all their rich characters and blues- and symbol-infused talk, there can be a central, possibly insoluble problem. In The Piano Lesson, for some, it’s the literal rather than metaphorical presence of ghosts. Here, for this critic, it’s the centerpiece journey to the City of Bones, a trip that plays more like a voodoo-tinged séance than a purgative vision — despite a cavernous set by David Gallo that suggests a furnished undersea grotto as much as it does the ramshackle house where Aunt Ester holds court on Tuesdays and Black Mary can be found dishing out cornbread and lima beans any day of the week.

Aided by Black Mary, Solly, and Eli (who sometimes don white-faced, blond-locked African masks or beat out tense rhythms on floor and furniture), Aunt Ester guides Citizen back into painful collective memory right there in the living room, providing him with a paper boat that, unfolded later, will prove one of the play’s more potent totems. We see Citizen see dead people, but all we see is this home pageant, a five-minute Roots that seems a woefully inadequate stand-in for the horrid, shameful history of slavery. More troubling is the way Wilson has altered what was, in the earlier script, a straightforward journey down into the hold of African-American consciousness, to the underwater city of gleaming bones and tongues on fire, and turned it into a more literal tour of slave life itself, with Citizen reliving some of its cruelties, only to be strung up and arrive at the City like a soul gone to its reward. The previous version is better integrated with both the theme and the ending of the play. Either way, however, the staging fails to make a poetic leap; it makes Wilson’s words — and they can be powerful words — do all the work.

There is toothsome writing in Gem of the Ocean, in Aunt Ester’s revivalist invocation of her first trip to the City of Bones, for example, and in Eli’s shrewd recollection of encountering Union soldiers: "They never said they was gonna help us. They said the war was gonna help us. After that it be every man for himself." But you have to sift for it. Too much of the play is driven by pounding knocks at the door and sudden announcements of off-stage events. And too often everything has to stop for a long set piece. Wilson says he doesn’t so much write for as listen to his characters. Sometimes he needs to tell them (politely, of course) to put a sock in it so he can delineate the arc of the play while still hearing the music. (Gem, like other Wilson works, has snatches of song and poetry woven into it.)

Given Wilson’s gift for character writing and the quality of the unofficial repertory company his works have spawned, it’s no surprise that the performances propel Gem more than those knocks at the door. The padded, purple-clad Rashad, playing a symbol (though there are indications that Aunt Ester is an inherited identity, with Black Mary to be next in the succession), is pronouncedly human: girlish albeit moving with the heaviness of history, bearing a couple of centuries worth of pain with disarming lightness, as if it were no more than a bit of arthritis. The raspy Chisholm (an Olivier Award winner for Wilson’s Jitney) captures both the rapscallion and the determined, gnarled revolutionary in canine-feces salesman/political martyr Solly. The precise Santiago-Hudson even brings a spry humanity to racial-Judas Caesar. (With him and Rashad on board, there’s comic timing worthy of The Cosby Show.) New recruit Lee is a relaxed, self-effacing Eli, and the improbably named Raynor Scheine, reprising the role he originated in Joe Turner and sporting a beard he might have stolen from Uncle Sam, is frontier-convincing as the white trader and help in troubled times, Rutherford Selig.

As probable lovers-to-be Black Mary and Citizen Barlow, LisaGay Hamilton (of TV’s The Practice) and John Earl Jelks must convey characters coming into their own, she as guide and healer, he as Solly’s successor. Hamilton gives a fine, understated performance that merges femininity and steel as she stands up first to the needy/cocky Citizen and then to the controlling Ester. And Jelks brings openness and a stillness that is not quite passivity to his troubled soul and revolutionary in the making.

Yet how things do ramble and clunk in the hold of Gem of the Ocean, which is named for a slave ship. Here is another decade present and accounted for in Wilson’s century-wrapping saga. But at least as it stands at present (and it is my experience that Wilson does more tinkering than bone-sculpting work on his scripts once they reach production), Gem is a zircon in a setting that contains some diamonds.