Dessa Rose

With Karla L. Beard, Susan Moniz. Apple Tree Theatre (see Resident companies).Surely whenever a theater located in a posh shopping mall produces a play about pre–Civil War slavery, the results are going to look relatively similar. Specifically, it's going to look like slavery behind plate glass—period costumes draped on waxy mannequins—perhaps with a small informational plaque about the underground railroad. In the first act of Dessa Rose (mounted by Apple Tree in the Shops at Elm Place), about an escaped slave girl (Beard) and the white woman who harbors her, that's most definitely the case. Unlike E.L. Doctorow's sweeping turn-of-the-century novel Ragtime, which Ahrens and Flaherty grandly adapted for the stage, the story of Dessa Rose (based on Sherley Anne Williams's novel), doesn't long to be romanticized. The titular character, while pregnant, has her inner thighs branded with a hot iron, and subsequently participates in a slave rebellion that leaves several people dead. It's not exactly the stuff of wistful chamber musicals.

In the second act, though, when the story focuses on the reluctant friendship between the rebellious Dessa Rose and her white protector (Moniz brings hearty substance to this role), the score—quite unexpectedly—improves dramatically. It becomes so listenable, in fact, that you begin to forget about the wig-and-hoopskirt distractions of Lococo's presentational production. While Ahrens makes the lousy choice to split the narration between the two women's monologues, musical director Doug Peck and his supple-voiced cast somehow overcome it, and you leave feeling like you've seen a real story, rather than the window-display version.—Christopher Piatt