You’ve likely heard of Florence Nightingale but perhaps not Mary Seacole, a similarly courageous nurse and humanitarian who was born in 1805 in Jamaica (she was the daughter of a white Scottish military officer and a Jamaican woman of mixed race) and was known for her heroic healing efforts during the Crimean War.
A recent biography of the mostly self-trained nurse (who served many British colonialists who became sick in Jamaica) claimed that Nightingale went out of her way to obstruct Seacole and prevent her from joining her ranks, likely due to a combination of snobbery in the face of the holistically inclined Seacole and Nightingale’s own racial prejudices. In recent years, Seacole has become better known in the U.K., where she now is often heralded alongside Nightingale, still widely seen as the mother of modern nursing.
Seacole left behind an 1857 memoir, known both for its detailing of astounding accomplishments and its fabulist tendencies. “Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands,” as penned by Seacole herself, forms the basis of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s “Marys Seacole,” now at the Raven Theatre in a Griffin Theatre Company production directed by Jerrell L. Henderson and Hannah Todd.
The 2019 piece, which premiered in New York just before the pandemic, is by no means a conventional biographical portrait: Drury is a postmodernist progressive, more interested in oppressive societal structures than the strength and failings of uncommon individuals, and her play moves backward and forwards in time, probing not just the story of Seacole herself but the whole question of how we view those who nurse and heal us in our hours of need. In many cases, as this piece continually observes, especially in its 21st century scenes, the patient (or parent) is white and the caregiver a woman of color.
This is a rich and dense play — it has something in common, structurally, with Caryl Churchill’s classic “Cloud Nine” — and not at all easy to stage. The Griffin production is rigorous and sincere, especially when it comes to the aptly daunting lead Mary, Stephanie Mattos (there is more than one incarnation of the title character), but some scenes feel overplayed in this very intimate space. And the show is a tad chilly, overall; it should have been possible here to really look the audience directly in its collective eye and help everyone intimately connect with the emotional landscape of this play, which is exploring humanity at its most vulnerable.
To really find a living pulse, the production needs a clearer track through its complicated narrative arc, notwithstanding some fine collective work from the cast, also made up of Izzie Jones, Jesi Mullins, India Whiteside, RjW Mays and Mackenzie Williams and some dazzling costumes from Anna Wooden. All in all, the show doesn’t yet fully capture the humor and humanity baked into this play’s serious societal dissections; it needs to take a few more healing breaths.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Review: “Marys Seacole” (2.5 stars)
When: Through Nov. 6
Where: Griffin Theatre Company at Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark St.
Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes
Tickets: $30-$40 at 773-338-2177 and griffintheatre.com
