he Ujima Company, a theatre cooperative in Buffalo, New York, has a twenty-two year history of working away at painful dilemnas - both on stage and off. 

In the first moments of Suzan-Lori Parks’ haunting drama, In The Blood, the word SLUT, emblazoned on a large wall of the theatre in bold scarlet letters, stigmatizes the dilemna of Hester, La Negrita, a welfare mother. Even when Hester has one of her sons wipe SLUT off the wall, the stigma remains.

Hester lives under a bridge with five children sired by five different men. Living is not the right word, barely existing is more like it. Nor is the word welfare accurate. Those who have power over Hester are also on welfare. They get what they want from her when they need it, and never have to pay; except with lip service and a few crumbs here and there. What Hester needs takes second place to her children's demands for survival, love and identity. What  she needs, never takes place at all. Except in a dream that back fires.

Jermain Cooper's sensually provocative Hester, all eyes and ears, shifting from foot to foot, studying her squabbling children, improvising around their needs and figuring out ways to feed them, reveals a natural caretaker of persistent innocence and vulnerability. Not innocence lost, or innocence lost and found and lost again, the stuff of fairy tales, but the kind of innocence that is the birth right of being a human being in a sub human world. For Hester there is no THERE out there, no golden slipper. Only the numbing, never ending regularity of sucking off Peter to pay Paul.

Director Lorna C. Hill utilizes the casting of double roles with round robin dexterity. Actors double cast as children and adults, play two sides of the same coin. Children playing with their fantasy toys, and adults who never grow up, playing with their fantasy toys. A striking theatrical device that brings the play home where there is no home. Especially when missing fathers and troubled sons are performed by the same actor.

Dwight E. Simpson does a bang up job as Baby. Sprawled on the floor babbling, drooling and knocking toys about, he appears, at first glance, comically incoherent. But his adult size and physical aggression suggests an out of whack child desperately grabbing at fleeting pleasures, destined to go nowhere in life. Simpson appears next as Reverend D., Baby’s father, a fast talking, high pitched preacher, busy building a church and preaching to Hester the benefits of leading the good life. When she gets down on her knees to receive some of the benefits, he gets his rocks off at her expense. Occasionally tossing her a dollar bill to provide for his son. Another absentee father in the name of Jesus going the way of all flesh.

Phillip Knoerzer plays the dual roles of Chilli and Jabber, Chilli’s son. Jabber uncontrollably steals everything he can get his hands on. Knoerzer captures the boy's dislocated kleptomania, and Chili’s self justifying fantasies, with equal aplomb. When Chilli appears out of nowhere, confessing to Hester that she has always been his true love, he also promises to take care of his son.  For Hestor it’s make believe ballroom time. He gives her a gift, a wedding dress, a fantasy about her faithfulness. Hester’s face lights up. Jermaine Cooper succinctly captures the single mother’s private angel, floating with diaphanous wings, toying with dice that have never been thrown her way before, and, once again, paying for it.

 One by one her children walk into the scene. Chilli’s fantasy about Hestor evaporates. He  throws on his fright wig, takes back the dress, and takes off raging – forgetting his son. Hestor stands fractured, a glass unicorn, shattered into a thousand pieces. Hope, a pitiful waste of time.

"Love never sticks longer than a quick minute.
Wanna see something last forever,
watch water boil."
Hestor

The bargain basement arrangements of Hestor’s life, pile up; often simultaneously humerous and sad. Beverly Dove’s Welfare Lady delivers a funny money picture of bureaucratic shape shifting posing as advice. While Hester attends to repairing the Welfare Lady’s coif, the Welfare Lady explains how she manipulates the system to her advantage for all its worth. Chit chatting Hestor with every day beauty parlor talk, the Welfare Lady is unconscious of its effect on her desperate client, who once again is trapped in a surrogate role.

Amiga Gringa (Hilda Ramos), a hip swinging, leather clad street walker confides that as tough as her job is, she is at least making it. And it pays well too. Why doesn’t Hector get into the act? Why are you trying to be so good, I’m doing ok. Make yourself a few bucks. Its not so bad, better than what you got going. Which is nothing.

The most bitingly satirical and hilarious moment of the play occurs when a street doctor (Hugh Davis) arrives to examine Hestor’s “woman’s parts”. He comes in with his medical implements on a home made tray. Pulling out a stethoscope, he slides under Hestor’s dress on wheels, like an automobile mechanic, and proceeds to examine her. What remains of her dignity as a woman is left to the imagination, but at least it’s a riff on absurdity. 

When Hestor painfully scrawls the letter "A" on the floor, we know that the first letter of the alphabet is all she will ever get to. A is not only a signature of despair, it is also a gesture movingly and defiantly human: a refusal to be turned into something  other than human. Eventually Hestor’s right to choose is reduced to a blistering hysterectomy of irretreivable consequence. Hysterectomy is the final solution to Hestors’ child caring problems, forced on her by circumstances beyond her control. Hysterectomy as metaphor, an act of repressive terrorism, with a left over life to kill. An act worthy of Supreme Court delineation  on the meaning of the word SLUT.

The Ujima Company, seriously committed to the community surrounding the theatre, is a rare, courageous and genuinely theatrical cooperative in the Buffalo/Rochester area. A model for other theatres willing to take a risk. Although dedicated to plays of people of color, its mixed casting is daring in conception and appropriate for the plays it does. Ujima doesn’t bother with conceptual limitations and uses talented people dexterously as a way to break the bonds of assumed cultural barriers. In short, they practice what they preach.

© 2001 Ned Bobkoff ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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