“Suffering is an enormous turn-on,” Reverend D intones in a voice that is dark and desperate, but it’s difficult to picture: How Hester La Negrita—homeless, hungry and hunkered down under a bridge beneath graffiti she can’t read—could have seduced a young man, a junk merchant, a doctor, a welfare worker and a Reverend. And yet the consequences have remained where their fathers have not: “Five bastards,” say five voices in acerbic chorus as the play begins.
In the Blood, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’ 21st century answer to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, offers a commentary on contemporary poverty that tempers good, old-fashioned didacticism with innovative storytelling. The story itself is familiar: An unwed mother, played with strength and grace by Aisha Reneé Moore, dodges the bureaucratic gnashings of society’s jaws as she tries to maintain a paradoxical, deeply troubling innocence that drives her into the arms of those who offer her nothing in return. She practices her alphabet, marking the space around her cardboard home with inexpert “A”’s, ignominy’s heavy-handed chicken-scratch (and Parks’ heavy-handed Hawthorne shout-out). She’s trying to make ends meet, but “the ends keep getting farther and farther apart.”
Parks’ range of topics would be tempting to offer to the audience simply as a jazzed-up, edgy condemnation of The Man and the tragic messes left in his wake, and the play does not shirk from its responsibility to this end; director Clinton Johnston has orchestrated the details, from a sparsely urban set to a sentimental soundtrack, to empathize unequivocally with Hester. Still, every member of the strong, six-person cast walks the fine line between preaching and evoking, particularly (if somewhat ironically) the Reverend himself, played by Mark Washington. In a series of soapbox confessions, each of Hester’s five “suitors” reveals how Hester came to be a baby-mamma five times over, and the mechanical exploitation of the poor becomes human under the complex, mixed-signal glare of sex: guarded and afraid, open and giving, implicitly consensual, alive.
Hester’s story has been written before, by Hawthorne and by America’s homeless, so its path is tragically predictable, but the cast barrels towards the climax with the energy of something unaware of its end. The play itself contains the momentum of a life that does not want to be contained, but the stage contains it, as Hester’s predicament contains her. When it’s done, it aches the way disappointment aches when it is seated deeply in the fact of its own existence. Ultimately, In the Blood earns the only grade it can be given: “A.”