Page 8
November 6, 2019
VETERAN’S DAY
Special Edition
Mississippi
Alberta
North Portland
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Jennifer Lanier (left) and Brittany K. Allen in “Redwood” at Portland Center Stage The Armory.
Photo by Russell J. Young/Portland Center Stage
Race and Truths Unfold in ‘Redwood’
o PinionAted
J udge
by
d arleen o rtega
There are some deep questions
hidden in plain sight for Ameri-
cans about how each of us is con-
nected to everyone else. For white
people especially, it’s not polite to
ask those questions, so they have
little practice doing it. For those of
us who are black, indigenous and
people of color, the answers can
also be dangerous. The world pre-
miere of “Redwood,” which just
opened at Portland Center Stage at
the Armory, aims to surface some
of those questions with a lightly
comic look at what happens when
the genealogy search undertaken
by a black woman’s curious uncle
reveals that her white boyfriend’s
ancestors enslaved her ances-
tors and that the two lovers are,
in ways they would never have
imagined, related.
Playwright and star Brittany
K. Allen means to surface a lot
that even the most “woke” among
us are not accustomed to grap-
pling with. In the Portland Center
Stage’s world premiere produc-
tion, it both works and doesn’t
work that some of the cast mem-
bers seem to be struggling to hold
their pieces of the story; at mo-
ments I couldn’t tell how much of
that was intentional and how much
was because the actors themselves
were having trouble holding the
discomfort of their characters’
journeys. Conversations between
Meg (Allen) and her mom (Jenni-
fer Lanier) and between Meg and
her boyfriend Drew (Nick Ferruc-
ci) sometimes had a distractingly
awkward rhythm.
The cast members who hold
the rhythm of this story best, as it
turns out, are four who move be-
tween multiple roles, functioning
as a kind of chorus in the end, and
often are on stage only to move.
One of Allen’s smartest choices
in crafting the play is to punctu-
ate the dramatic action with in-
terludes of hip-hop dancing; four
cast members enter the action to
dance or do yoga, and are fully
in their bodies and in connected,
powerful rhythm. Meg’s uncle
Stevie (Tyrone Mitchell Hender-
son, funny and facile), whose an-
cestry search sets the play’s events
in motion, sometimes joins them,
often awkwardly and a bit out of
step. Henderson adroitly captures
the challenge of entering the flow
of the truth of shared connections.
American life as we have con-
ceived it does not prepare us to me-
tabolize and embody much of what
is true, as Allen’s play reveals. At
best, we can talk around the edges,
including among our closest rela-
tives. Even before Stevie uncovers
the difficult connections between
Drew and Meg’s family, Meg and
her mother react differently to the
prospect of exploring the past; mom
doesn’t see the point and evinces
familiar (if somewhat unexamined)
signs of lifelong discomfort with
holding a family history of enslave-
ment. Meg is not, perhaps, as afraid
as she should be; a millennial whose
reactions evince familiarity with an-
ti-racist, anti-colonization concepts,
she little expects to learn anything
that will challenge her own sense of
agency.
But challenged she is, and so
is Drew, whose white family has
good progressive credentials. He
fumbles for the right words to say
when Stevie confronts him with
their shared family history and
calls his own father to inquire
about his familiarity with their
legacy as enslavers. Dad (Orion
Bradshaw, on point as dad and
also dancing hip-hop) classically
dodges the question as one that is
not polite to ask. Case closed.
And yet, dad also evinces some
health problems, including gout--
not like what homeless people get,
he is at pains to point out. Gout is
apparently caused by an excess of
acid in the blood; my read would
be that dad’s body is evincing
some signs of struggle with the
family’s unmetabolized history.
His Korean-American wife Hattie,
whose energy is clearly absorbed
with caring for him (“I have to
cream your dad’s foot,” she in-
terjects more than once), is able
to hold more curiosity, even if it’s
not as focused as it could be. As
played by Ashley Mellinger (an-
other of the dancers), her facility
evinces some practice at navigat-
c ontinued on p age 10