Lee Colston’s wonderfully unexpectant play, The First Deep Breath, celebrates two things; acceptance and truth. We see very little of either until the end of this meaty story that challenges us to think about how high a regard we hold for these two liberating ideals. The family we’re introduced to is the total opposite of what it appears to be. It’s through them we learn the cost of choices.
Pastor Albert Jones III (David Alan Anderson) heads a thriving church that’s on the verge of expanding exponentially. By edict and through force of will, he’s also the prosperous engine that propels his family. Following his cues, the family seems in perpetual grieving for an adult daughter who died a tragic and early death. He wears his personal mourning conspicuously while other regrets fester to compound his grief. His wife Ruth’s (Celeste Williams) mind is being destroyed by Alzheimer’s and his oldest son is doing time for a crime smeared with shame. Any one of these things would weigh heavily on a soul. Always appearing unflappable to outside eyes, he keeps his Job-like “Why Me” wail to himself. For all that he’s and his family are contending with, these trials are but mere harbingers of a wave of events that will besiege and threaten to destroy this fragile family that appears so solid.
A work of scale; unrushed, and with a great deal of intentional depth, means The First Deep Breath is long; running 3 ½ hours with two intermissions. Stuffing the plot with action and surprises powerful enough to make you catch your breath, Colston made sure audiences would either not notice or not care about time. He was also intent in giving us a thorough feel for each member of this secret filled family; making it wonderfully illuminating and instructive to see each of them take shape and develop.
When Alain Locke, the father of the Harlem Renaissance, met with other black intellectuals in the early 1900’s to determine what kind of theatrical performance would best illustrate the black experience during those decades of blanket race based ostracism, one faction wanted to highlight the psychic complexity black people share with the rest of humanity. It’s that approach that makes The First Deep Breath so engrossing. Complemented by impressive acting, the story shows how intensely personal and gripping it can be to watch people make decisions about how they live their lives.
Conformity has been a road to acceptance for as long as civilizations have existed. Many also consider it crucial to the cohesion of families. When the patriarch is as commanding and authoritative as Pastor Jones, a man accustomed to being deferred to and obeyed, all that fall under his influence follow the natural order and seek his approval through acquiescence. Dee-Dee (Melanie Loren), the surviving and less favored twin daughter sings in the choir and only winches meekly when her mother longingly calls her by her dead sister’s name. Her love for and obligation to her family make her sublimate the love she has for her man and causes her to keep the child she’s carrying even a secret from him.
AJ (Patrick Agada), the youngest of the three living children, is the repository of his father’s legacy. With his older brother disgraced, and his prior predilection for following in his father’s footsteps; the inevitably of his succession is all but guaranteed. A senior in high school with offers and scholarships from premier universities around the country to pursue divinity studies, he can’t summon the courage to tell anyone he may be auditioning for entrance into Juilliard.
Colston draws these characters intricately. The audience becomes an eyewitness to the carnage rampant deception can wreak on a family and see firsthand how it produces a brittle and flimsy harmony. As counterproductive as repressing self to promote peace seems to be, we’re shown that indeed the cost in individual misery is high. And that toll is exacted most brutally on the brother who carries his father’s name. Albert Jr. (Clinton Lowe) who changed his name to Abdul-Malik while serving time, harbors an unspeakable love. So unspeakable he chose prison rather than reveal it.
The lives of these characters would be enough to saturate a play with energy and they do. But Colston is a maximalist and makes his minor characters as essential as the major ones. Pearl, divinely played by Deana-Reed Foster, is a beacon of joy, truth, and the source of much needed humor in her role as Mrs. Jones live-in caregiver sister. Dee-Dee’s boyfriend, Leslie; faultlessly performed by Gregory Fenner, acts as an oracle of reason in a scenario swirling with the toxicity of secrets and the father’s blind ambitions. Jalen Gilbert as Tyree, the confidant of one brother and clandestine lover of the other brother, does an equally splendid job trying to instill or restore balance to a house of teetering cards.
Some of the topics the play tackles still linger on the border of the taboo in the Black community; even though people are proving better able to confront issues relating to sexuality and mental health with a willed forbearance; if not actual tolerance.
Celeste Williams splendid portrayal of a woman fighting a losing battle with Alzheimer’s starkly profiled the day-to-day and hour-to-hour stress an insidious disease creates for the people tasked with providing care. Sometimes there can be periods of clarity and at other times flights of cruelty. In the second act, as the family sat around the Thanksgiving table, clarity and cruelty came together explosively when she launched into an extended excoriation of the lies and deceits each person in the family trafficked. The audience had been a vocal one all through the play, and when William’s character Ruth began her assault, someone uttered cryptically, “She’s goin’ in”. And she was; meticulously and proudly resolute. Her truths proved the catalyst for change to finally happen.
But with any good psychological cliffhanger, we don’t know exactly what that change is. That the play closes with words of promise can only be counted as encouraging.
The First Deep Breath
Nov 15 – Dec 22, 2019
Victory Gardens Theater
2433 N. Lincoln Avenue
Chicago, IL 60614
773-871-3000
tickets@victorygardens.org
