The cast in Underground Railway’s impressive production of
THE CONVERT (playing through Feb. 28th) is the chief reason to see
the play. Director Megan Sandberg-Zakian’s actors all give extraordinary
performances. Over a half century ago, Lorraine Hansberry’s exquisitely painful
LES BLANCS covered similar territory, that is, colonial oppression in Africa. Now Danai Gurira’s play, THE CONVERT,
concentrates its focus on Africa’s religious
conversions at the end of the nineteenth century.
Maurice Emmanuel Parent in a remarkable tour de force manages
to make the overzealous, overbearing Catholic proselytizer totally charming.
When his housekeeper (Liana Asim in a superb comic turn) outfoxes him and tells
him she has a convert-in-the-making for him, we’re in on the conspiracy. The
girl (a luminous Adobuere Ebiama) just wants to escape her nasty uncle. The
first act has an abundance of gentle humor, most of it at the preacher’s
expense. Parent struts and grumbles his objections to folk traditions, but you
know he has a good heart and his concerns, albeit misguided, are sincere.
The playwright introduces
us slowly and carefully to the other characters, clearly leading us to believe
that only one, the covert’s greedy uncle, has bad intentions. But when three of
the characters entirely change their personality to become violent for a
shocking finish, it’s just not credible.
Even more upsetting, is the playwright’s explanation for the
abrupt transformations: She tells us they have reverted to their “tribal”
nature, equating tribal mores with what the preacher calls “savage ways.” If we
are to believe that, then we’re buying into the spurious European, white view
of what is and is not civilized. Act one held such promise with such rich
characterizations. Alas, acts two and three are derailed by plot twists that
dramatically make no sense.
