LOVE IN THE TIME OF LANGSTON: Theater Review (Because I used to write these once upon a time ago and I came across this one that made me smile)

By the time you read this review, you’ll probably know that The Ways of White People by EgoPo Classic Theater and Theater in the X has been sold out since it opened last Thursday. This show is easily the most buzzworthy piece of art in the city right now. Word of the production wildfired through Philly with reviews in almost every major news outlet, articles from the Inquirer and WHYY have been shared and shared. I mean when is the last time you saw a playwright on the 6 'o'clock news, yet here we are. The love is organic and necessary and deserved. 

I was given this assignment over a month ago by happenstance—or synchronicity. Alaina Johns, editor of the Broad Street Review, sent out an email asking if I’d take it, because no one had picked it up and I thought Langston Hughes—he’ll never disappoint. 

A few days later, I met a sweet smelling man who told me he’d never seen a play in his life and I invited him to come along as my date. I figured this would be very fun or very awkward. 

Even if you haven’t read Hughes’ 1934 book of short stories, you’ve likely read something by Hughes—he promises and he delivers—through  poems, in fiction, non-fiction, children’s books, and now this unconventional experience, with scenes from his first book of short stories reimagined into immersive theater, led by tour guides to different worlds happening in room after room of a the Glen Foerd Estate on the Delaware River, an eclectic victorian mansion overlayed with African masks and mudcloth and drumming and a gong.

My sweet smelling date showed up early. In my anxiousness (or foresightedness), I’d told him 6 pm when the play started at 7, so we had the entire mansion to ourselves for almost an hour. He wore his best turn of the century attire, a three piece suit in muted earth tones, a pocket watch on his large lapel. 

When we think of the Harlem Renaissance (the entire Egpo season is dedicated to this theme, so even if you missed this show, be ready in April for Plum Bun), Langston Hughes is our guy. Alice Walker said in her 1989 essay, Turning Into Love: Some Thoughts on Surviving and Meeting Langston Hughes, that Hughes, who mentored her (and so many of our other literary lighthouses including Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, and Margaret Walker), write as a duty and a devotion. For that she asks, “how do we honor him?” Walker shares that when she first met Hughes, she had never read a single one of his books and ignorantly told him so. Without reprimand or rejection he handed her a stack and said it’s not too late. “There are not many people with that kind of grace,” Walker said of his character. So if you haven’t read any of Hughes’ work, or just not enough, it’s ok. It is not too late.

I knew the show would be Hughes, but I didn’t imagine Hughes like this. The Ways of White Folks brings together two directors, two theater companies, and two distinct racial groups—White Folks and Black Folks. And it doesn’t try to oversimplify the complexity of what it means to live with, work with, and sometimes fall in love with, people who you also somehow don’t like, kind of despise and maybe even hate. The Ways of White Folks turns a sharpened eye onto the social dilemma of forced coexistence—beams a light at it, burns a hole through its soul—and asks what it's like living with, working with, and sometimes falling in love with “the other” today, a hundred years after Hughes’ Harlem. 

I may have loved the show too much. I can’t stop thinking about it and telling people about what it was like to have a monologue performed by three men, 3 Roys, sometimes speaking in chorus, so close you can reach out and touch them. One of the men sickly, coughing, and unkempt lies before us dying in his bed. My sweet smelling date’s eyes swelled in awe or disgust or a bit of both—not at the dying violinist—but at a society willing to kill a classically trained musician because he attempted to shake the wrong woman’s hand. If you do get to see, tell the people who can’t as much about it as you can. 

I can’t stop talking about Ontaria Kim Wilson, who co-directed and co-starred in this production. She delivers, Cora, a piece on motherhood in the Mansion’s makeshift kitchen. After offering us fresh baked cookies, she laments the loss of children and the finding of oneself—under a single light, sometimes breaking the fourth wall and then putting it right back up again. In less than ten minutes I am broken—a cracked egg on her kitchen floor. So close we make eye contact and she must see the tears streaming down my cheeks. My sweet-smelling date puts his arms around my shoulder and squeezes, a gentle and welcome reprieve. 

The Ways of White Folks is alive and stimulating and moving and freeing and challenging in all of the right ways. “This is theater?,” my sweet smelling date asked innocently as we traversed through the Glen Foerd Mansion from library to living room from basement to backyard. “THIS IS IT!” I said smiling and with a whisper. “But broken down, torn apart and sewn back together as it should be from time to time.”

By the end of the evening I was first in line to buy a copy of the book, The Ways of White Folks, but my sweet-smelling date insisted he wanted to buy it for me. I told him to ask Ontaria to sign it for me and she said yes. “Thank you, Jeannine for your support.” No Ontaria, thank you, my friend. 

Without a doubt Philly is having her own renaissance and Ontaria has channeled Hughes to help her lead it. My hope is that funders and patrons take note from the show’s sponsors, Dr. Joel & Bobbie Porter, and build on this momentum. 

But the big question is will there be a date number two? 

Regardless, I found love.