Home

Williams’s 1979 play is a poetic, picaresque examination of the last, tumultuous midcentury shift of African-Americans from the rural south to the urban north in the ’60s and ’70s. Home bursts with the playwright’s longing for the humid embrace of the South, its sweet night air and star-filled skies. “Come home, children of the land, babies of the soil,” it implores.

One of those “babies,” Cephus Miles, narrates his own journey, attended by two women who play a kaleidoscope of supporting characters. Cephus starts out a humble farm boy from Crossroads, North Carolina, who enjoys bootleg liquor, the softness of his fiancée’s calico dress (and her legs under it) and the succulence of plowed earth and growing things. He’s sprung from his homespun existence when his intended moves away and he’s caught resisting the draft, landing him in prison. From there it’s on to the big city, where he discovers that, in the new urban “promised land,” women are loose and times are tight.

Parson’s production distinguishes what’s a straightforward telling of a universal story in miniature, thanks to the precise and engaging physicality of its first-rate trio of actors. It’s percussive, acoustic, and told through three bodies and voices and a single heart. Bolden doesn’t quite seem emotionally connected with his character’s ups and downs, but Bonner and Honore craft the story’s intersecting characters with compelling nuance and energy. Despite its lyrical dialogue and everyman themes, Home feels authentic, indeed a place to be perennially cherished and sought.

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