Theater Review: ’Bov Water, Northern Stage

Bobbi Johnson and Erin Margaret Pettigrew in ‘Bov Water Credit: Courtesy of Mark Washburn

It’s easy to list what the new play ‘Bov Water doesn’t contain — a plot, a conflict, even a stable sense of time and place. Yet viewers may find themselves steeped in an experience of tragedy, triumph, wisdom, suffering, compassion and love. How those emotions arise is the difficult part to describe, but feeling them is easy at this innovative play by Celeste Jennings, lavishly produced by Northern Stage with a talented cast of professional performers.

Jennings calls her play a choreopoem, the term coined by Ntozake Shange to describe her acclaimed 1976 theater piece for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. Shange’s play, like Citrus, Jennings’ previous play produced by Northern Stage, consists of poetic monologues performed by a group of actors, with dance and music supporting the enactment of personal stories. With ‘Bov Water, Jennings shifts from pure poetry to dialogue, but she confines events to episodes and uses movement and choral speech to replace conventional dramatic structure.

The moments occur in Mississippi, Atlanta, New York; by a tree or in a river; anywhere, because they are fragments of family history recalled. The stories begin in 1876 and extend into the 2000s. The play doesn’t so much rocket through time as ignore it, presenting realistic scenes announced by the choral invocation “Before we were ancestors, it was … 1977,” or whichever year we’ve floated to. The moments are memories, the small trail of four generations of a Black family.

These moments are small, but all reveal the craving for connection.

Three actors change roles scene by scene. The characters’ names are relationships: Somebody’s Mama (Kelly Renee Armstrong), Another Daughter (Erin Margaret Pettigrew) and Sister Girl (Bobbi Johnson). This chorus then becomes particular people. Through different eras, Sister Girl plays a sister, a friend and a daughter; Somebody’s Mama is pretty nearly everybody’s mama or aunt; Another Daughter plays a friend, a cousin and a mother, each of whom pulls away from the people she loves.

The actions are modest. Lourline writes a newspaper notice to find her enslaved mother after the Civil War. Jean wants to know all of Cassie’s secrets, especially about her pregnancy. Teenagers Lydia and Tilly share hopes about the future. These moments are small, but all reveal the craving for connection.

Motifs repeat themselves, but because Jennings resists exposition for each new scene, the repetition blurs characters more than it establishes patterns. Viewers must make guesses about how characters are related, and often this reviewer felt like an eavesdropper who had a wonderful vantage point but no way to make sense of the story. It’s disorienting yet consistently exhilarating.

The show defies many theater norms and succeeds at making minor, incidental moments glow with life. It also creates barriers to viewer engagement by eliminating context. We simply don’t know whom we’re listening to, though we can always locate the passion in each person. For some viewers, a play with such fuzzy storytelling will feel unwelcoming; for others, it will blaze a trail.

Asking the audience to accept confusion is also a way of underlining the play’s overall sense of longing for lost loved ones. Liza, a member of the current generation of the family who was likely named for the enslaved Eliza several generations back, is trying to gather her family’s stories. Vignette by vignette, the play shows memories built from emotions more than incidents. Liza’s quest for identity includes a search for origins, which slavery obliterated for most Black Americans. She values each morsel of personal history, whether fact or feeling.

Director abigail jean-baptiste honors the sweep of time in the script by letting each scene unfold with a sense that there’s all the time in the world. Speech is allowed to be languid; characters pause to think and connect rather than just rattling off dialogue. Movement is precise and often gorgeous. A character may place a chair with a dancer’s grace or fold laundry like a meditation.

Armstrong, Pettigrew and Johnson hold together the play’s gauzy framework by investing themselves completely in the emotions of each moment. While the playwright withholds exposition, these accomplished actors pour out their characters’ feelings.

When Pettigrew reads aloud her character Lydia’s letter about a boyfriend she may or may not be quite ready to let go of, the actor slowly hauls herself through each contrasting emotion. Pettigrew uses the reluctance to reveal emotion to expose its strength, rebuking herself as if in command of her feelings, only to dissolve again.

Armstrong radiates a mother’s warmth, wisdom and compassion, and we see the price of her perspective when she shares private doubts about her own child. Johnson concentrates so powerfully in her scenes with Pettigrew that they seem to be the closest of sisters, and she lets her characters whipsaw between fear and bravado. All three performers use physicality to weight the scenes with the taut precision of dance.

Choreographer Ashleigh King contributes their moves, including a vivid game of patty-cake using heel taps and hand claps. The scenic design, by Yvonne L. Miranda, is larger than life, just as memory might make it. Triumphant and oppressive lines of laundry hang in the background with a suggestion of kudzu vines hovering over the clothes.

Lighting designer Amina Alexander uses bleached-out lighting at scene changes to show memory itself as a scorching force. Together, the designers convey a sense of water through reflections, of fire with sound and light, of air with the suspended laundry, and of earth with a huge tree whose roots and crown reach everywhere.

The play’s dialogue is fastidiously realistic, while its structure is stylized. That contrast sharpens awareness of both extremes; watching it feels like being juggled, very safely, between two different ways of perceiving.

In the end, you’ll hear mothers from multiple generations speaking of hoping to plant a peach tree just over there in the yard, but the voices will blur, and you won’t know how many formed the same thought. Watching ‘Bov Water is about losing your bearings and trying to grasp the nature of memory itself.

The original print version of this article was headlined “Tree of Life | Theater review: ‘Bov Water, Northern Stage”