The playwright York Walker makes a promising New York debut at Roundabout Underground.
Much is made over whether one is “with God” or not in “Covenant,” a striking new Southern gothic work by York Walker. Following a town’s reaction to a bluesman’s mysterious homecoming in 1930s Georgia, this small, potent Roundabout Underground production sustains a scorching end-of-days tune as much through its electric cast and design elements as by Walker’s script and Tiffany Nichole Greene’s swift direction.
Like each of the play’s four women, the 24-year-old Avery (Jade Payton) craves salvation. But she’s not seeking a flight to heaven, like her overbearing Mama (Crystal Dickinson), or from neglect, like her younger sister, Violet (Ashley N. Hildreth). Rather, she desires a certain kind of freedom. Ruthie (Lark White), a lovelorn neighbor grappling with her nascent sexuality, feels the same.
A chance at that freedom appears when a childhood friend, Johnny (Chaundre Hall-Broomfield), returns to town after a yearslong absence, touring faraway juke joints. A smooth-talking guitarist, Johnny has dropped his stutter and — rumor has it — picked up prodigious musical skills from a pact with the Devil.
Walker nods at the legend of Robert Johnson, the real-life bluesman whose startling technique gave rise to a claim that he had traded his soul for success playing “the Devil’s music.” But, though that mystery informs this play’s effective ghost story, “Covenant” is more interested in unraveling the women’s trust in faith, self and one another to examine how feelings become codified into mythology.
The pious Mama thinks she can spot a dark spirit when she sees one and forbids Avery from spending time with Johnny. Seduced by his promise of a life bigger than her repressive own, she doesn’t obey, naturally, and soon comes home one night with bruises and a funny look in her eye. As the locals chatter, gossiping about midnight sightings of Johnny at the graveyard, the play probes each woman’s relationship to fact and fiction.
Greene’s suspenseful production indulges in some elegant horror trappings, with characters often plunged in darkness, holding a single match as they share tales of cheating spouses and bad decisions — personal freedoms marked as evil because they stray from cultural dogma.
Lawrence Moten’s claustrophobic set turns the audience into the cramped congregation of a Gothic Revival church, the action taking place on either side of its nave and lit by Cha See. Steve Cuiffo’s illusions and Justin Ellington’s sound design, both chilling, lean deep into the story’s supernatural suggestions.
But the play’s terror is best conjured by Walker’s dialogue, which weaves rumor into legend and is delivered in gradient shades by an excellent cast. As Avery and Johnny, Payton and Hall-Broomfield play their scenes alluringly straight, and in her forceful turn as Violet, Hildreth believably generates powerful, skeptical chemistry with White’s awe-struck Ruthie.
And Dickinson’s sanctimonious Mama comically punctuates each “lord” and “God” with the emphatic righteousness of a “T” sound, and with her beaded eyeglass chain (courtesy of Ari Fulton’s costumes) appears to have tears permanently fixed on her face.
The violence of her devotion is made eerily physical in a choreographed prayer sequence (with movement overseen by Stephen Buescher) that shows the carnality often inherent in religion, which can traffic as much in darkness as in the light it claims to seek.
If Walker reverse-engineers certain beats a bit too cleanly in order to expose the characters’ hypocrisies, his twists and developments are still satisfying. Working with great economy, Walker’s “Covenant” is an auspicious New York debut for a playwright who clearly has a gift for richly textured work.
Covenant
Through Dec. 3 at the Black Box Theater, at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.
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