(L-R) Lindsay Smiling and Bruce A. Young in a scene from "The Blue Door" stand in front of the blue door, a door that was traditionally used to keep African families safe from harm. (Michael Brosilow)
Lewis is a brilliant college professor of math (a sterling performance by Bruce A. Young) who finds himself confronted by his wife. She is leaving him after many years of marriage and her main reason is that Lewis will not participate in the Million Man Walk.
Understand that Lewis’s wife is white, and he is African-American. She believes he is living a life that denies his heritage: He has chosen to forget his past and lose his true identity in favor of a better life.
When the play opens in Lewis’s study (a simple but fashionable set by Keith Pitts), he is sipping tea and looking at a book—not really reading—but using it to take his mind off what has transpired that night. Although he is dozing off, he talks to the audience as if he could see beyond the fourth wall into our eyes.
As he is telling us his situation, a spirit (Lindsay Smiling) from his history appears. This is the first ancestral ghost to appear, but he is visited by other apparitions, principally by his brother, his father, and his great-grandfather.
Director Andrea J. Dymond takes these men through a marvelous trip that allows Lewis to learn who he really is and why it is wrong to deny his roots. He learns how important the sacrifices of others have been in allowing him the opportunity to live the life he leads.
The story deals with segregation, slavery, crimes of passion and hate, and it deals with the legacies that our forefathers created for us. Although this is squarely an African-American experience, this story would be easy for many people to relate to, whether Latino, Jewish, Russian, Polish; people, who for one reason or another, had to leave their world for another due to oppression, religious or otherwise.
The blue door refers to the African custom of painting a door blue in order to keep away evil. The evil could have been animals, slave-masters, the KKK—anything, even perhaps spirits who insist on telling their stories.
Dymond glides us effortlessly through this history lesson weaving the past and present very tightly, allowing us to grasp the intent of the story in detail and in about 95 minutes with no intermission. A break would have only made it difficult to stay with the great characters written.
Smiling, playing the role of all three spirits, must change roles onstage, with little more change than a jacket or vest and cap. He does so with ease and his range of voice and demeanor tell us when he has changed from one character to another.
The music by Larry Gilliard Jr. (with lyrics by Ms. Barfield) brings the past to the present, as we hear slave songs, both happy and sad. The lighting by Charlie Cooper and sound by Andre Pluess, along with the simple costuming by Judith Lundberg and subtle videos by Liviu Pasare, complete the painting that Barfield and Dymond create.
The Blue Door
Victory Gardens Biograph Theater
2433 N. Lincoln Avenue, Chicago
Tickets: 773-871-3000 or www.victorygardens.org
Running Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Closes: February 28
Alan Bresloff writes about theater in and around the Chicago area.
