Black Theater Ensemble’s … And Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi sounds like a bait-and-switch, drawing people in with a whimsical title that turns out to be a metaphor. But there really is a Jesus, and he does moonwalk the river in light-up Chuck Taylors. It doesn’t make much sense, but then again neither does the play. Luckily, both are worth seeing anyway.
Jesus, (Jeremy Guyton, MSB ‘12), is one of the production’s bright points. He’s a young Christ delighted by his power and uneasy with his responsibility, and he can only find release by grabbing some characters and turning the Mississippi into a dance party.
The river is more than a place to cut a divine rug, though—the play’s central story, about an escaped slave looking for his daughter, begins and ends in it. After being lynched, the slave, played by Obehi Utubor (SFS ‘09), is transformed into the goddess Demeter and acts out a refashioning of the classic myth, searching for her daughter Persephone.
That sounds tricky, but Utubor plays both sexes ably. Although her story becomes heavy-handed toward the end (one character tells her she “looks like a goddess” in a new dress), Utubor deftly conveys both paternal and maternal angst and longing.
With all that excitement, it’s surprising that the character of the Mississippi, played by Stella Clingmon (SFS ‘10) is so boring. Clingmon brings great pipes to her songs, but she rushes through her intricate speeches as if uncomfortable with the slang and her accent. By the third time the Mississippi mopes onto the stage, viewwers are prepared for confusion and a delay in the play’s storyline.
The production’s minor characters—Jesus, a twelve-year-old Yankee spy (Stephen Murray, COL ‘12) and a series of soldiers and a white Southern girl all played by Miranda Hall (COL ‘11)–are, along with Utubor, the most compelling reasons to see Moonwalks. Murray makes his child soldier both sympathetic and sinister in turn, even putting a chill into the line “You’re going to give me gas.”
Guyton’s Jesus never gets old, whether he’s palling around with the Mississippi or showing off healed stigmata. Hall’s Confederate soldiers are alternately sneering or endearingly curious, and her Blanche—a girl too innocent to notice that black skin might disqualify someone from being her sister—lightens the play at its heaviest point.
At the end, all those symbols—water, words, seeds—threaten to capsize the play and send it to the bottom of the Big Muddy, and things only got worse when some ship to Zion showed up. More forgiving play-goers might not have this problem, but it seems like the play would have been more enjoyable if it had stuck more literally to its title.
