Robert Bailey (Photo by Daniel Rashid and Avi Kaye)
Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
Moving Arts Theatre
Through Sept. 20 (with a two week hiatus between Aug. 24 and Sept. 12)
RECOMMENDED
Writer/performer Robert Bailey’s riveting solo show is set in post-Civil War Appalachia, in a “dark valley” that serves not only as the story’s geographical setting, but as a descriptive for the murky spiritual place inhabited by its troubled main character.
For the outlines of his narrative, Bailey drew on the plot of Brand, Henrik Ibsen’s 1866 dramatic poem about a fiery preacher whose refusal to compromise seals his fate. Both Ibsen’s protagonist and Bailey’s have the same surname, which in Norwegian means fire. Both seek redemption by following, and interpreting for others, the will of their God as they perceive it. Both speak harsh words to their flock, and demand much. Both wrestle with being moral in an intolerant world. And both learn too late that there is more than one path to personal salvation.
The Reverend James Brand we meet in Bailey’s play grew up the sole surviving child of an aging father and a young mother who cared for money above all. The misery of his childhood somehow forged a religious calling and a determination, even as a youngster, to preach far and wide. But Brand’s desire to roam ends when famine-stricken residents of his native town, along with the woman he loves, pleads with him to remain with them and be their pastor. Heretofore solitary, he briefly finds some measure of human joy in his wife and son.
These events are all part of the story the Reverend spins when we meet him in a forest, which, notwithstanding a dark, nearly bare stage, is vividly portrayed via Phil Saguil’s striking sound design, with its potpourri of bird calls, chirping insects, rustling leaves, and later more ominous noises. Subtle lighting by Zoia Wiseman underscores the shift in mood and scene.
On that stage, in worn, almost tattered garb, Bailey’s Reverend speaks intimately and confidingly, the small theatrical venue where he’s performing heightening one’s sense of one-on-one. Every so often, he intersperses his monologue with a heartrending folk song or with melodic strains on a harmonica. His performance takes in the other characters in his story, whom he also portrays — his gentle wife Agnes, the mysterious woman on the mountain who challenges his faith, the Black mother he encountered in childhood who — against the grain of his Southern upbringing — imparts to him respect for people of another race. And the mayor of his town who, decades later, makes it clear that Brand’s tolerance of Black folk is unacceptable to the overwhelming majority of the people he leads.
Directed by Billy Siegenfeld, this is memorable theater. If the narrative itself is of a particular time and place, the play’s message — what happens when fervor closes the mind and twists into an instrument of pain — is certainly of our time, and every other time as well.
Meantime, for 65 minutes, we journey into the soul of this wildly errant yet unflinchingly honest character, whose life has been bleak, but whose willingness to share somehow opens on both sides a small porthole of light.
Moving Arts Theatre, 31191 Casitas Ave., Atwater. Sat., 8 pm. Sun., 4 pm; thru Sept. 20 with a two week hiatus between Aug. 24 and Sept. 12. https://movingartspresents.ludus.com/index.php?show_id=200487819 Running time: 65 minutes.
Note: for more insight into this playwright and this play, read Isadora Swann’s interview here.
