Date: Fri 28-Mar-1997

Publication: Bee

Author: SUEZ

Illustration: C

Location: A12

Quick Words:

Long-WHarf-theatre-Settler

Full Text:

(rev "The Old Settler" @Long Wharf, 3/28/97)

Theatre Review-

On New Haven Stage, The First Look At Second Love

(with photo)

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN - Personified by playwright August Wilson and critic-director Robert

Brustein, a cultural debate has been raging across the country this year:

Should black playwrights and actors concentrate their energies on productions

that deal specifically with black experience and issues (Wilson), or should

the theater be color blind and all its practitioners focus on universal themes

and common humanity, as Brustein contends?

John Henry Redwood's The Old Settler , a marvelous play getting its world

premiere at Long Wharf this month, might well satisfy both parties. Set in

1940s Harlem, this study of the relationship between two sisters and their

young boarder is a droll portrayal of the impact of big city style on

unsophisticated country people who migrated to the north. It is also a

lovingly detailed re-creation of a time and place, where blacks found refuge

from the indignities of a segregated society. The Old Settler continues its

premiere engagement through April 6.

When Husband Witherspoon, a naive young visitor from Frogmore, S.C., decks

himself out in the zoot suit, roach kickers and "conked" hair that he hopes

will please his errant girl friend, Lou Bessie, it is in a classic tradition

whose roots extend back to Shakespeare and Moliere.

But alongside this tale of an irrepressible optimist who, on discovering that

his "dream girl" has become a gold-digging floozy, proceeds to woo his

middle-aged landlady, there runs a more troubling theme in the story, revealed

in bits and pieces: A widowed cleaning woman saved up for years to afford

tickets so she could spend Mother's Day with her mother in Georgia, only to be

summarily put off the train in Washington, D.C., stranded with four children

and no money, because the seats for whites had been overbooked.

This is a play about family secrets, swallowed pride, and human pretensions

and defenses. Elizabeth, the landlady who first takes in her sister Quilly and

then, to help pay the rent, lets a spare room to Husband, endures the dual

humiliations of a life spent as a daily cleaning woman for whites, and of

being an "old settler" - Harlem slang for a spinster with no prospects. The

only man she had ever loved had been taken, 25 years earlier, by Quilly, an

unspoken fact that looms between them.

Thus Husband's genuinely sincere attentions become all the more poignant as

they open up the unexpected possibility of hope. By turns sulky, jealous and

manipulative, but also shrewdly insightful, Quilly realizes Husband is

probably turning to Elizabeth as a replacement for his dead mother. She issues

dire warnings about what will happen, and from there, the story heads toward

resolution.

The acting in this show is superb. Brenda Pressly is a touching study in

modesty and integrity as the gentle, but determined, Elizabeth, coming alive

with inner vitality as she allows herself to risk love a second time.

Myra Lucretia Taylor, as Quilly, is a quintessential kid sister. All her life

she has taken from Elizabeth, but she hides her feelings of need and

dependency behind a posture of "attitude" - an all-purpose grumpiness that

masks both her own fear of abandonment, and her simmering anger at racial

inequities.

Tico Wells is endearing as the irrepressible Husband, who may not know his way

around city streets but has unshakeable confidence in his own powers, while

Caroline Stefanie Clay is hilarious as the glamorous, fast living Lou Bessie.

Walter Dallas' careful direction plus Loren Sherman's beautifully crafted set

and David Murin's perfect period costumes all work together to evoke a piece

of American history, in which the world of the hardworking, respectable

Sisterhood of the Baptist Church contrasted with the high life represented by

places like Smalls Paradise and the Savoy Ballroom.

The Old Settler offers a glimpse of humanity that is both as specific and as

universal as the yearnings of Chekov's dreamers or the impatience of Ibsen's

stifled housewives.

My recommendation is that you don't miss it. The play is surely headed for a

Broadway run, where the tickets will cost twice as much as they do at Long

Wharf, but if you hurry you might still catch a performance in New Haven.

( Contact Long Wharf, 222 Sargent Drive in New Haven, at 787-4282 .)