Jenise Sheppard as Woman 3, LaKecia Harris as Woman 1, and Arielle Leverett as Woman 2 in Lifeline Theatre and Pegasus Theatre’s “From the Mississippi Delta”/Photo: Suzanne Plunkett
RECOMMENDED
Lifeline’s funny, poignant, zippy production of “From the Mississippi Delta,” Endesha Ida Mae Holland’s 1990 play about the writer’s lifelong journey from the Jim Crow South, through the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and on to a Ph.D. and professorships soars on ILesa Duncan’s clever direction and the stunning, virtuosic performances by its three cast members. The trio takes on so many different roles that I lost count. At the final bows, I felt deeply grateful to these players, LaKecia Harris, Arielle Leverett and Jenise Sheppard, who shared the stage for nearly every moment of the hundred-minute show. They play women and men, young and old, rich and poor, white and Black, drunk and sober, wise and foolish. Sometimes they play the same roles as each other, including that of Phelia, the character Holland based on herself. The actors also sing spirituals, blues and civil rights anthems, gloriously. They make this show one that demands to be seen.
What makes their feat even greater is that as a play, “From the Mississippi Delta” is a wildly mixed hash, which in just slightly less capable hands would likely wither. Part of the problem may be that excellent, profoundly moving books, film and theater about the worlds of Black people in the South have become a feature of mainstream culture, while Holland’s work was conceived at a time when she felt a need to tell a broad history through her own life. She told a big history to a white audience that needed to learn the basics of a shameful century and one that, at the same time, offered an uplifting story of possibilities to a Black audience. I say this realizing that there’s a need for dishing the history out again and again, especially at a time when politics are increasingly racialized and when a large faction of white so-called conservatives seem hellbent on suppressing any whiff of history that looks at the history of race relations in our country critically.
Arielle Leverett as Woman 2, Jenise Sheppard as Woman 3, and LaKecia Harris as Woman 1 in Lifeline Theatre and Pegasus Theatre’s “From the Mississippi Delta”/Photo: Suzanne Plunkett
Yet “From the Mississippi Delta” often moves so fast, and changes scenes and characters so quickly, that it frequently only signifies important issues of race, class, sexual abuse and commerce, and the activism of the Civil Rights Movement, where one might wish the playwright honed in on one or the other and went deep. The play works perfectly in the few longer vignettes that have a folksy, funny but ultimately serious “Lake Wobegon”-quality to them. One of the most engrossing reenacts how Phelia’s mother, named Ain’t Baby, a sharecropper who became a revered village midwife, saved mother and newborn from death with skillful care and some shaman-like incantations. The vignette lets us linger on Ain’t Baby’s greatness. When the play moves to another vignette portraying Ain’t Baby’s death—caused by burns inflicted by a torching of her shotgun cottage—and funeral, the cast sings a soulful, doleful rendition of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” The opening lyrics, “I was standing by the window, On a cold and cloudy day, When I saw the hearse come rolling, To carry my mother away…,” give a whole new context to the song. Such scenes make the play more than worth seeing, and the shallower bits, which are rescued by the killer cast, make it doubly–triply so.
“From the Mississippi Delta” at Lifeline Theatre (in association with Pegasus Theatre Chicago), 6912 North Glenwood, (773)761-4477, lifelinetheatre.com. Through June 18.
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