Invictus Theatre, going gangbusters on Irving Park Road, is cementing a reputation as the home of epic American drama. Following on from its huge success this summer with Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” this small company is now taking on Marcus Gardley’s “The House That Will Not Stand,” a show first seen in Chicago in 2016 in an exciting Victory Gardens Theater production directed by Chay Yew, two years before the show’s off-Broadway premiere.
Gardley, who had a writing fellowship in Chicago around a decade ago, wrote about the circumstances in which some Black lives were lived in pre-Civil War New Orleans. At the time, French planters often formed domestic and sexual relationships with free women of color, or sometimes enslaved women, in what were called mariages de la main gauche, or left-handed marriages; some historians have seen this as an outgrowth of the preponderance of male colonialists whose wives often remained in France. Being the female party in this quasi-legal arrangement meant a better life than those in many other circumstances, including the chance to own property or, if enslaved, to gain freedom. But as Gardley’s play makes clear, the relationship also could be a trap. And, even if it worked out better than expected, history shows us it did not last. And, as the title suggests, Gardley was interested in its final throes.
Tellingly, a French planter (Ron Quade), a party to such an arrangement, lies prone and dead at the rear of the stage. In front, what happens next plays out.
Adding to the complexity here, Gardley’s free-wheeling play is a darkly comic riff on “The House of Bernarda Alba,” the Federico García Lorca drama known for its high level of sexual tension.
Ergo, this is a hard piece to stage. But director Aaron Reese Boseman, who grew up in the West Pullman area and is making his mark on Chicago theater, has found a cast made up of compelling performers, some of whom have been around the non-Equity scene for a while, others newcomers.
One challenge with a staging that uses a multi-level set by Kevin Rolfs (quite similar to the one for “Angels in America”) is landing all of the speech in the lap of the audience, rather than up into the rafters, and also maintaining dramatic tension across such a broad visual, thematic and temporal landscape. The show has its struggles with both and the stakes don’t always rise as they should.
But Boseman also has a lot of creative, immersive ideas that offer new insights into a play that uses the idea of a house to mean not just a specific New Orleans place but the entire institution of slavery, maybe crumbling, maybe not. All of the performances have their moments, including the quite commanding Britt Edwards as the placée Beartrice Albans. Kaylah Marie Crosby, Aysia Slade and Sierra Coachman all deftly embody the variously frustrated daughters of the house, so to speak. Sandra Adjoumani, who plays La Veuve, is very much alive and Shenise Brown, whose enslaved housekeeper, Makeda, is really the conscience of the show, clearly understands how to anchor all that goes on here while reminding us that our individual fates may or may align with what we expect.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “The House That Will Not Stand” (2.5 stars)
When: through Dec. 14
Where: Invictus Theatre Company at the Windy City Playhouse, 3014 W. Irving Park Road
Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes
Tickets: $25-$28 at invictustheatreco.com
