Come Home
Jovelyn Richards
Friday February 26, 2010
$15 adv. $18 dr. - 8pm
For advance tickets click here.
In Celebration of Black History Month Jovelyn Richards presents Come Home, a story told through the voices of women and children, about choices made by black people living in a small rural Arkansas community under the terror of American Apartheid during the pre & post World War ll period. Accompanied by live music.
A review of Come Home By Flora Lynn Isaacson
Jovelyn Richards’ poignant one-woman show opened last Friday at the Marsh. This was the world premiere of a play about 26 black soldiers who leave their home in lynch-torn Arkansas to fight against Germany in World War II. Thirteen of them survived in August of 1942. Although the plot unfolds in the segregated South, Come Home is timeless in its evocation of how war and violence can change a community and its way of life, both for the men who return and the families who waited for them.
Richards plays 14 characters but not one of them is a soldier. Instead, she tells their stories through their families, their wives and children, the ones who help the soldiers move back into their everyday lives and give them the therapy they so desperately need. Come Home is told mainly through the eyes of Donna Ray, a joyous young bride romping in the fields as the play opens and then a resilient Mrs. D. at the close.
Jovelyn Richards is accompanied by four musicians who are onstage right during the entire performance. These musicians (David Erin, pianist and vocalist; Susan Appe, vocalist, pianist and percussionist; Kimberly Turner; violinist and vocalist; and Rose Ketabchi, violinist, improvisationalist and vocalist) use a mixture of blues and jazz to echo and heighten what is happening onstage. The only flaw in the performance for me was the volume at the beginning was too low to be audible.
Stephanie Ann Johnson’s lighting design is particularly effective with Jovelyn Richards’ luminous costume. The stage design, by Courtney Riley, scarcely used stage left except when Ms. Richards went to a chair to give birth to a baby.
Adele Prandini (former director of Theatre Rhinoceros for 10 years) sensitively directed Jovelyn Richards in all the right moves. Richards is able to use her body like an instrument with perfect rhythm, gestures and almost dance-like movements.
