The Chicago Theatre Company’s haunting production of “The Mojo and the Sayso,” playing on weekends at the Parkway Playhouse, works some mojo of its own.
Set on the third anniversary of the wrongful death of 10-year-old Linus Benjamin, who was shot in the back, Aishah Rahman’s 70-minute play details the paralyzing guilt and neuroses that have afflicted the Benjamins since the day of his death. Mourning and speaking indirectly, the three remaining family members dwell in dreamscapes.
The biblically named father, Acts (Charles Glenn), pours all his thoughts, emotions and energies into a half-built vehicle rescued from the scrapheap, which he’s working on in the living room. Awilda (Zuindi Colbert), the mother, buries her loss and sorrow in the church as embodied by a rapturous pastor (the resonant Colin Jones), whom she has confused with Jesus. Blood (Craig Derrick), the remaining son, pretends to be a gun-toting, knife-wielding punk and wants the family to move to Mexico.
The family’s fixations became exaggerated to the point where they are all myopic and fumbling. “Do you know what it is to be the surviving brother?” Blood asks his father during a heated moment. (Acts is guilt-stricken because he could have attempted to save the child.)
The living room combines the atmosphere of a garage with that of a wake. The venal, writhing pastor, who stomps in to deliver a gravelly and sonorous sermon, keeps the dead child present for the mother so that he can get some of the family’s wrongful-death payouts. (“My only concern is Linus and his immortality,” he says to Awilda, who always wears “saintly” white from head to toe-on his instructions). The family needs psychotherapy as much as a good exorcism.
Rahman’s script is eerily poetic. But because it is so spellbinding, “The Mojo and the Sayso” (which has hints of August Wilson and Eugene O’Neill) seems too short. The play ends on a promise, when the pastor, because of Blood’s act as a wannabe hood, metamorphoses into a scavenger. With the preying pastor exposed, there is hope that Acts and Blood, too, will overcome the grief that has warped them.
The simple staging, scenic design and the music all conjure up ghostly scenes. Philip Van Lear’s direction is excellent, Rahman’s script is original and gripping, and the actors commanding.
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“The Mojo and the Sayso” plays at the Parkway Playhouse, 500 E. 67th St., at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays through March 6. Phone 312-493-5360.
