An Immigration Story With America as a Central Character

From a rising Haitian-American writer comes “Where the Mountain Meets the Sea,” the story of a son’s search across America for the ghost of his father. Jeff Augustin’s second piece at Manhattan Theatre Club is pregnant with his own past, detailing two distinct storylines and their overlap. A Haitian immigrant in his mid-60s, Jean Charles, tells of his lonely journey to America in 1978 to build a life. He works humble jobs with pride. “I move luggage,” he says. “I’m good at it. Delicate. I respect people’s belongings. Sometimes their whole lives are in my hands.” Theater veteran Billy Eugene Jones imbues the character with grit and naïveté, and then yearning. (If you think you recognize him, you probably do — from last season’s “Fat Ham” at the Public or one of his many Broadway credits.) His son, Jonah, on the other hand, is cut from a different cloth. He is a gender-queer academic in his mid-30s on a road trip mirroring the one his parents took when his mother was pregnant with him. They are now deceased and he is searching for a posthumous understanding of “their America.” Chris Myers’s Jonah balances an appropriate collegiate haughtiness and a desperate desire for connection — with the men he meets, with his late parents, and with himself. Our protagonists tell their stories in soliloquy, speaking directly to the audience, inviting us in. They watch each other, as if seeing each other for the first time.As I watched the piece unfold, I could think of no starker representation of our current generational divide. This father and son share blood and little else. Mr. Augustin highlights these differences in their tones and lexicon, in the relationships and connections that they seek, and, most prominently, in their attitudes toward America. “My dad, growing up, talked so much about Mt. Rushmore,” Jonah says to the audience. “To him, it’s a great symbol of America. Democracy, progress. In that mountain, in the eyes of the presidents, is the American Dream. So, I thought it was going to be something godly — a wonder, to take my breath away … but when I got to the mountaintop, face to face with the presidents of the Rushmore, in a sea of white families, I laughed. Really, I cackled.” In those eyes, Jonah says, he saw the “scam of the American Dream.” Directed with a sort of nostalgic nebulousness by Joshua Kahan Brody, the piece takes place in an amphitheater-like arc tucked into a mountainside, where “memory is as real as the concrete walls of the theater.” The musicians are prominently featured upstage center as the actors traverse the space freely, following their impulses from one side to another. The sides of the set are lined with reflective metal, shimmering like a mirage in the desert. There is a third character that I would be remiss not to mention here. Shaun and Abigail Bengson, a New York City based duo, play a requisite role, saturating the piece with distinctly American folk-sounds, accompanying the actors and performing original music. In fact, Abigail’s haunting yodel is so much a part of the piece’s sonic backdrop that it becomes another cast-mate. Their songs play in both timelines, a universal language connecting disparate generations, the single thread tethering the dead with the living. “Oh my loveWas it you who was just here? The empty room is ringing again I can feel when you’ve been near “Oh, won’t you turn me aroundSo I can see your face again?”

An Immigration Story With America as a Central Character

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