Kenny Leon’s Revival of Samm-Art Williams’s ‘Home’ Is Cause for Celebration

Over the past two decades, Kenny Leon has done more than any other director to bring major and rising Black artists to Broadway, including stars such as Denzel Washington and Audra McDonald and playwrights ranging from Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson to Katori Hall. Two years ago, Mr. Leon helmed back-to-back productions of Suzan Lori-Parks’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Topdog/Underdog” and Adrienne Kennedy’s “Ohio State Murders”; the latter, written in the early ’90s, marked the Broadway debut of a revered scribe who had just turned 91. With his latest venture, Mr. Leon is introducing contemporary audiences to a less widely celebrated name: Samm-Art Williams, who just died in May following a career that combined theater with television credits encompassing both “American Playhouse” and “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.” His most famous play and the one Mr. Leon has chosen to revive, “Home,” arrived on Broadway in 1980 after an acclaimed staging by the Negro Ensemble Company; it has not been back since. Its return is nothing short of a cause for celebration. The play and Mr. Leon’s production are modest in scale: a one-act piece running 90 minutes, it features no performers as famous as Mr. Washington, or as widely adored as Ms. McDonald. Tory Kittles, a star of the CBS series “The Equalizer,” is the most well-known; he’s joined by Stori Ayers and Brittany Inge, who share extensive theater experience but are both acting on Broadway for the first time.Yet guided by Mr. Leon’s unabashed passion for the material, these superb actors all mine the wit and wisdom underlying the quainter aspects of Williams’s play. The result is an account of faith repeatedly and harshly challenged, but finally affirmed and restored. It is as exhilarating as it is poignant.Tory Kittles, Brittany Inge, and Stori Ayers in ‘Home.’ Joan MarcusMr. Kittles plays Cephus Miles, a native of Cross Roads, North Carolina, who appears to have been, as the old blues song put it, born under a bad sign. Orphaned at an early age, he soon also loses the grandfather who has essentially parented him, along with a beloved uncle. A young woman he adores and intends to marry, Pattie Mae Wells, leaves for college and finds another beau.The Vietnam War brings even more trouble: Cephus’s refusal to serve, on the grounds that “Thou not shall not kill” — a commandment drilled into him as a sometimes wayward student at Sunday school — lands him in jail, and he loses the family farm. After his release, he’s branded a traitor and, desperate, finds himself lured to a big city, identified only by the existence of an A train and other subway lines.As Cephus’s downward spiral continues, the seeming aloofness of a higher power becomes a running joke. “I believed in God,” he tells us early on, in a preface of sorts. “I believed in him totally until he took a vacation to the sun-soaked, cool beaches of Miami.” That sojourn is referenced repeatedly until the play’s final passage, which is bound to warm the hearts and moisten the eyes of all but the most incredulous and cynical of the audience members.Along the way, the actresses accompanying Mr. Kittles handily juggle a variety of roles. Ms. Inge, whose fetching Pattie Mae is by turns prim and mischievous, brings equal zest to an overzealous drug dealer and a priggish schoolteacher with a bootlegger husband, while Ms. Ayers scores in parts ranging from a sadistic prison guard to a plucky alcoholic who befriends Cephus at his lowest point.Like Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” Cephus is comforted — albeit more briefly — by other quirky characters he meets. But his troubled journey leaves him little hope of getting back to Cross Roads, conjured in Arnulfo Maldonado’s set design, with its cool blue sky and lush greenery, as an idyllic place.Yet “Home” reminds us that one can be miserable in the most desirable setting — even on those Miami beaches — without a sense of belonging, and of being loved. It’s an old and simple truth, but in this play and this production, it resounds movingly, and gives rise to abundant joy.

Kenny Leon’s Revival of Samm-Art Williams’s ‘Home’ Is Cause for Celebration

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