'Tree' at the Ford

Hollywood, California – Didi Marcantel is a professor of race and gender studies at a southern university. A white woman in the South, daughter of a long estranged father, she is herself confused about gender. Is she lesbian who’s not yet taken the plunge into her own sexuality? Now, with the death of her father, she has found a box of letters disclosing a family secret. He had fallen in love with a black girl in the racially divided ’60s. He was a grocery delivery boy, she a girl with a dream of career. They fell deeply in love; their relationship angered both parents. She became pregnant; they parted. With her father dead, Didi’s life is empty. She doesn’t make friends easily; her relationships fail. Now she knows that she has a brother and she has come north to find him.  Tree is a family drama, a lonely heart in search of connection.

North is Chicago. Leo is a chef caring for an impossibly senile-cum-dementia mother who shrieks and screams, lapses into reality once in a while, and sees herself as already dead. Leo is divorced; his lovely college-aged daughter, JJ, is today’s generation — a totally different mind-set on both race and gender. And to his home, Didi comes knocking, pretending to be doing an article for a newspaper — a lie Leo quickly uncovers. She tells him that she believes him to be her father’s son. He couldn’t care less. Actually, he’s known about it. His father has made overtures which he denied. He sees his father as a careless white man who got his mother pregnant and dumped her.  Didi is a persistent searcher, Leo the reluctant half-brother who wants no part of this woman — daughter to the father he felt deserted them.  Not only race and gender but the universal search for love in a discordant family is the premise for this intriguing, long one-act by an excellent cast currently playing at the Ford (Inside) Theater.

The play centers around Didi’s sexuality, black/white relationships, and difference in attitude between the ’60s and the attitudes of JJ’s contemporary age. Some dialogue is directed toward that theme: the father’s skill at cooking, Leo’s desire to open his own restaurant, the demented mother speaks of having a “dick,” and Leo’s recognition of Didi’s sexual ambivalence. But the play plunges deeper than what was “politically correct then and now.”  Didi’s search is of the heart for family identity — universal chasm between parents and children when political realities do not recognize love.  We learn through the letters that this was a passionate love — the one great love of a lifetime from which Leo’s demented mother and Didi’s father never recovered.

Of particular notice, the characterization of the senile mother: her strength and her heartbreak show through the madness. We always see the woman she was before age and disappointment  destroyed her.  Perhaps her moments of sanity in which she remembers and discloses might push the reality of the drama, but she engages us in the force of her performance.

The play by Julie Hebert — a producer of Numb3rs — highly poetic and lyrical, was originally written in two acts, now produced by Ensemble Theater Studio as a 90-minute one-act. The four actors carry the work as a seamless piece. Chuma Gault as Leo, Jacqueline Wright as Didi, the wonderful Sloan Robinson as the demented old woman. When she runs onto the stage in her underwear (the script calls for her to come out naked), she betrays her age with a younger body, but she carries the part, lapsing into the patois of Louisiana.  JJ is played by Tessa Thompson as today’s young woman, far from the attitudes of the recent past.

Except for the few “clues” scattered here and there to show family connections, it’s flawless performance in an engaging play.

But a word about the Ford. Before you can enjoy it, you have to find it. Our drama began before the performance. In a coffee shop on Highland (Hollywood), we looked at the map. A turn here, an underpass there. We questioned and, at the register, we met a gentleman — tall, dark, intense…he knew the Ford. Follow him. We jumped into our car behind this mysterious, unsmiling, dark-eyed stranger, trailed him out into Saturday night traffic, in and out, a quick change to the right, a side street and onto what looked like a freeway on-ramp. (Freeway to where?) A sudden right turn and he deposited us on the parking lot of the Ford (Inside). Whoever you are, thank you kind stranger. (Somehow we always rely on the kindness of strangers.) No, Hebert isn’t Tennessee Williams, but Tree is off to a strong start as an intense, compelling family drama that transcends a theme play and is worth the effort to locate. When you order your tickets, ask for directions.

At the Ford (Inside) until December 13th
(323) 462-3673