In Leslie Lee’s rarely produced 1974 drama, “The First Breeze of Summer,” an elderly and declining family matriarch looks back on her three torrid but mostly disastrous love affairs, one of which involved a smug white employer. “I was a colored woman with life in my bones,” she says, by way of simple explanation to her disapproving grandchild. “They were tender to me.”
“The First Breeze of Summer” at the Court Theatre presents one of life’s great dividing lines. You can either embrace the power of sensuality in all of its cultural and racial messiness, or you can stay out of the bedroom and tie yourself in overachieving, self-loathing knots. That’s pretty much Lee’s message — this was 1974, after all, and the Afros on the stage aren’t the only markers of a freer-thinking, freer-feeling period.
It’s quite a different point of view from, say, that of August Wilson, a great and disciplined theatrical moralist who invariably portrayed the breakdown of the nuclear African-American family as a destructive legacy of racism. In Lee’s torrid and deeply fascinating play, the cultural progression starts with the life force of an indomitably passionate individual and suggests that we owe a lot to our grandmothers, even if they spend a lot of time in their bedroom. Maybe it’s not so different from Wilson after all.
Ron OJ Parson, the skilled director of this show and resident artist at Court, is the perfect partner for artistic director Charles Newell, a restless classical revisionist. Not only is Parson here energetically reviving a period drama that very few Chicagoans have seen before, but he embraces its florid, middle-brow, flashback-laced style, layering this unusual but provocative revival with lush music and filling the fake tree on Jack Magaw’s romantic setting with shimmers of sensual light.
There’s not much sparse or subtle about this show, but then there’s not much sparse or subtle about this play. At times, it feels like you’re watching a long network sitcom or movie-of-the-week from the mid-1970s — some of the twists, fights and coincidences are almost laughably forced.
But Parson also is a smart enough director to stand apart from that style, even in midst of its embrace. And the play is capable of surprise. In this production, at least, “The First Breeze of Summer” is a richly complex experience that sparks a lot of different feelings in the viewer. And that’s a compliment.
It helps that Parson has assembled one heck of a cast, including the great A. C. Smith as the middle-age product of one of his mother Lucretia’s love affairs. Lucretia is represented by two different actresses. The openhearted Cynthia Kaye McWilliams plays her in her bedroom prime, even as the richly empathetic Pat Bowie looks back on those memories from the floor below.
Meanwhile, the younger generation tries to make its own way without having anywhere near as much sex.
The one theme that the production doesn’t fully catch is the sharp contrast between Lucretia and her grandson Lou (Calvin Dutton). Dutton’s character comes off as so easygoing throughout much of the play, it’s hard to believe his rise to the core conflict at the play’s conclusion.
But otherwise, fine actors such as Jacqueline Williams, Brian Weddington and Jonathan Eliot hunker down in the trenches of mostly well-meaning people whose lives, like all of our lives, are stuck between self and family, present and past, work and sexuality, torment and happiness.
“The First Breeze of Summer”
When: Through June 15
Where: Court Theatre 5535 S. Ellis Ave.
Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes
Tickets: $32-$54 at 773-753-4472
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cjones5@tribune.com
