Hester (Victoria Dunn) lives on the streets with five children she’s had by five different men over the past 11 years. That she is uneducated is evident from her curvy attempts to write the letter “A.” That society has oppressed her is evident from personifications of social welfare, religion, and patriarchy telling us, well, that they have oppressed her.
There is nothing subtle in Suzan-Lori Parks’s In the Blood, a play lacking in any real flesh-and-blood characters. On multiple occasions Hester explicitly decries the “hand of fate” coming down on her, and it would be anathema to Parks for us to consider whether Hester bears any responsibility for the choices she’s made — or even whether she has any agency whatsoever.
Victoria Dunn does about as well as she can with Hester. When she says, “I been tired lately, like something in me is broken,” not only do we believe it, but we’d believe it even if she never said so. And this couldn’t be more important to whether In the Blood has any chance of success with people who don’t question art that makes them feel (which I assume is Parks’s target demographic).
But apparently the only thing that Parks thinks we need to know about Hester is that she’s a victim, a receptacle for cruelty, a target of a society that “like[s] to keep our poor at arm’s length,” that “depends on a well-drawn boundary line,” that has “a trench for its waste.” We can presume she grew up poor (though I don’t think we’re even told this), but everything else is a blank. We know she’s uneducated, but we have no idea why Hester keeps drawing the letter “A” — which is as far she’s gotten in terms of literacy (did she go to school at all?) — in a manner that’s far more difficult than the simple bilateral symmetry of the letter itself. Where on Earth did she see this? Does she suffer from a cognitive or motor defect that keeps her from making two lines meet at a point? Are there no street signs in her urban landscape with the letter “A” on them, from which she could copy and improve? How did at least one of her children learn to read though they’re never in school? We learn how she got pregnant with four of her kids, but never about why she took all the pregnancies to term and little about why she’d rather let these kids approach starvation than accept offers to get her child support.
Maybe the answer to the last question is that, in the universe of In the Blood, “the system” is filled only with predators. But by general-/demonizing “the system,” Parks undercuts her own social commentary (In the Blood is nothing if not social commentary). Her lack of nuance, her reduction of everything/-one in the play to vague stand-ins for real societal shortcomings in how we treat our most vulnerable members, makes In the Blood less a drama than a simplistic screed. Social services just wants to screw you if you’re a woman, religion just wants to screw you, the patriarchy just wants to screw you (okay, so it’s true about patriarchy).
You can’t fault the rest of the cast with their adult roles (a welfare caseworker, a preacher, etc.), although, again, because these aren’t really people, in effect we’re just supposed to boo-hiss (internally — don’t be rude) as if they are characters in a melodrama. The closest to an exception is Hester’s friend Amiga (Lilith Le Fae). Although Amiga is kind of tacked on to the proceedings, Le Fae has an energetic monolog that allows her to deliver the same line twice with completely different import.
Unfortunately, they do a bit less well doubling as Hester’s children, leaning too much into cutesy stereotypes and displaying affects far too similar when such an age range is in play. But of course Parks hasn’t really written the kids as people, either, so….
The tiny patch of urban real estate that is more or less the sole setting for In the Blood is nicely rendered by Robert Young, particularly a curbside that somehow preserves the illusion of being a piece of outside even as you keep staring at it. The sound design is less convincing, if for no other reason than a particular vocal utterance, louder than anything else making up the acoustic ambience, repeats several times, calling your attention to the fact that it’s on a loop.
One of the best scenes in In the Blood is a dance by Dunn and Richard J. Martinez, who plays Hester’s first baby-daddy (a stand-in for patriarchy) and comes back to town now that he’s put himself in a position to provide for her and their lovechild. While reminiscing about their childhood romance, they perform one of those highly choreographed dances with all sorts of specific moves that pair to the lyrics in one way or another. I don’t know whether this is a found dance or was patched together in-house by director Craig Johnson and choreographer Matt Julian, but it serves the purpose well, giving us a brief reprieve from Hester’s suffering in the only scene that throws us a few scraps of her background.
Why haven’t I mentioned The Scarlet Letter, what with “Hester,” the letter “A,” etc.? I guess because I’m not sure it matters. As I said, there’s nothing subtle about In the Blood — the Hawthorne allusions are just more heavy-handedness.
To give Parks the benefit of the doubt, In the Blood seems designed more to evoke a visceral reaction — an ad hominem attempt to make us sad and angry about what raw deal the underprivileged get — than to stand up to any real analysis. And while that’s not what I want from art, more than one woman told me afterwards that In the Blood had them bawling their eyes out, so there’s no question that there’s an audience out there who’ll appreciate what the Garage is offering right now. And there’s no reason to believe that audience is exclusively female.
In the Blood at the Garage Theatre
Times: Thursday–Saturday 8:00 p.m.
The show runs through October 12.
Cost: $25 (Thursdays 2-for-1); closing night w/afterparty: $30
Details: thegaragetheatre.org
Venue: The Garage Theatre, 251 E. 7th St., Long Beach