“I like being surrounded by all the old s—,” says teenage boy Z. He’s in his happy place, under a magnolia tree, where, as it turns out, he will discover hidden letters, and where he will learn personally meaningful things about his ancestors, and where he can feel far away from his controlling and abusive father, Ezekiel. Under the magnolia tree, he can contemplate what it was like here in Georgia when it was just “the land and the moon.”
Z, who’s Black, is sexually involved with his best friend, Danny, a white kid who insists he’s not gay.
All that might provide enough high-stakes material for a play, but playwright Terry Guest has much higher aspirations for “The Magnolia Ballet,” a 100-minute one-act drama now in a luminous production at Shotgun Players in Berkeley.
It’s not just gay male relationships that Guest aims to explore, or racism, but also father-son pairings —both Z and Danny have fraught connections to their overbearing dads—and the ways that history and ancestral influences (in this case, even familial curses) can affect the present.
Indeed, Guest’s drama goes as far back as the origins of slavery in this country. The theater’s program includes an advisory, warning viewers that the play includes references to the Middle Passage, lynching and other violence; use of the n-word; and more.
As instructive as the play is at times, as adept as Guest is at conjuring images and scenes that we dread seeing, dialogue that we cringe at hearing, he is never didactic.
And under Aejay Antonis Marquis’ direction, “The Magnolia Ballet” utilizes every form of theatricality available to illuminate the action: music (the actors at times sing spirituals and hymns and Jules Indelicato’s sound design includes audio samplings of songs in various African languages); expressive movement (choreographed by Marquis); and camera and video projections (Spense Matubang, designer).
Imani Wilson’s set includes a hazy upper level that’s inhabited at times by an ancestral “apparition,” played with great dignity and versatility by Devin A. Cunningham.
So rich in subject matter and emotional intensity is the play that it almost comes as a surprise at curtain call to realize only four actors tell this time-traveling, sometimes surreal story. In addition to Cunningham’s elusive figures, there’s the main character, young Z (a deeply connected Jaiden Griffin); Nicholas René Rodriguez’s hyperactive, troubled Danny; and Drew Watkins as both the Black and the white father of the two boys. It’s to the credit of playwright that all the characters are multifaceted, and to the credit of Shotgun’s director and actors that, however flawed, they are fully realized in all their human contradictions.
Complicated, ambitious, sensorial, “The Magnolia Ballet” can also be confusing at times, and the dialogue occasionally feels a tad trite. But at other times it soars.
Where you will laugh and where you might cry surely differs from person to person. It’s what makes this whole play feel, despite its huge themes, so very personal.
Shotgun Players’ “The Magnolia Ballet” continues through Aug. 10 at Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley. Tickets are $12-$80 at shotgunplayers.org.
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