Steve Noll
Atticus Cain, Jamie England and Quanda Johnson (from left) in the Broom Street Theater and Knowledge Workings Theater co-production "Genealogy."
When I was a little girl, growing up in a starkly white small town, I remember learning about the Civil War and the fact that Black people had been enslaved, bought and sold, and treated in unconscionable ways. As a six year-old with a keen sense of right and wrong, I reasoned that white and Black people would have to switch places at some point: I would have to take my turn being enslaved. That seemed only fair.
Since that time of clumsy schoolyard equivalency, there have been many calls to compensate descendants of enslaved people for the atrocities done to them throughout American history, and the continuing fundamental mistreatment of Black people in America through systemic racism. But as Jamie England’s character, Muggs, states in Broom Street Theater/Knowledge Workings Theater’s production of the new play Genealogy, white people don’t like to talk about this sort of thing. Which is exactly why this play, written by T.J Elliott and Joe Queenan, and skillfully directed by Dana Pellebon, is important viewing. We need to talk about it.
The play starts with two well heeled, well educated couples meeting to record an episode of the sensational podcast Chasing the Dead, where a guest’s shocking genealogical research is revealed each week. Hot-shot lawyer Hamilton “Ham” Hunt (played thoughtfully by Donavon Armbruster) learns during this broadcast that one of his ancestors from the 17th century was an indentured servant who worked his way up to slave owner. Both of these discoveries make Ham squirm. He is especially appalled to see research that connects a distant relative to raping an enslaved woman and then setting her “free.”
Of course this piece of DNA evidence links him to another guest on the show — a Black, former Philadelphia Eagles football great named Mosiah Wilson (a measured Atticus Cain), who has long since traded in his jersey for a Ph.D. in philosophy from an Ivy League school. While being connected to a gridiron star this way simultaneously excites and horrifies Ham, it thrills Mosiah’s wife, Aaliyah (a driven Quanda Johnson) — perhaps now that he’s been publicly outed as the descendant of a slave owner, the pit bull lawyer will take on her activist organization’s legal case for reparations.
While Ham stammers and gasps with each revelation, his wife, Muggs (a no-nonsense Jamie England), coolly calculates the cost of her husband becoming involved with a noble, but likely doomed case, largely to assuage his white guilt. She makes monetary offers to buy the family out of trouble in between pouring herself cocktails at the open bar.
For podcast host Glen Weber (a glib Jackson Rosenberry), the more controversy and conflict on his struggling little show, the better. If only he could get the guys in the control room to stop sabotaging the recording with random sound effects, and finally take him and his thousands of Twitter followers seriously.
What follows, during the eloquent but talky 100-minute play, is part history lesson, part tag-team wrestling match, and part thoughtful debate about the ramifications of slavery — and repressive Jim Crow laws — on Black Americans and what responsibility white Americans have to right these wrongs. The program note from the playwrights lists an impressive bibliography on the subject, so it’s clear they have done their homework. As a result, there are a welcome number of specific, divergent points of view expressed here by four very different stakeholders.
And to give the characters some dimension, each one has distinct quirks — Muggs drinks too much and rules her marriage with a protective eye on the bottom line; Ham has both a practical and a quixotic take on the law, which comes through whenever he’s not gushing about his love of football. Mosiah starts every line with a quote from a famous philosopher and would like to turn his back on the fame that brought him fortune by disappearing from the white gaze; Aaliyah feels chronically undervalued as a community college professor and wants desperately to parlay this meeting into a major step forward for her cause. Weber just wants the sound guys to stop playing foghorn noises during this taping and give him the respect he deserves as a major “influencer.” (This running gag wears thin very quickly, but provides the only comic relief in the show.)
But outside of these identifiers, the people on this podcast are largely mouthpieces for opposing political views. Although it is performed by a top-notch cast, the slow pace of the show compounded with fairly static staging made the conversations feel long and drawn out. (The tempo will probably tighten up as the actors grow more confident in their lines and cues.) Over the course of the performance there is interesting information shared, but very few surprises in between the diatribes. It often feels more like a TED Talk than a play.
That said, Genealogy provides a thoughtful forum for a lot of issues on race and reparations, discussed seriously among equals, and that is valuable in any format. In perhaps the most profound moment of the play, the two couples finally do come together — to fight simply for the chance to be heard. And so they should be.
