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by Marcus Gardley, directed by Philip Akin

Shaw Festival, Studio Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

June 21-October 12, 2024

La Veuve to Beartrice: “You may be the wealthiest colored woman in New Orleans, but you built this house on sand, lies and dead bodies”

The House That Will Not Stand, a play from 2014 by Black American playwright Marcus Gardley, is an unusual work that borrows the plot of a famous Spanish play, relocates it in a very specific time and place in Louisiana and seeks to lend this slice of history a symbolic meaning. This mixture makes the play rich in allusion but sometimes awkward and confusing. Director Philip Akin is a sure guide through the play’s clashing modes of tragedy and comedy, reality and the supernatural, even though there is nothing he can do o make the particularities of the play’s setting familiar. Though Akins’s seven-member cast is uneven, two of its members give extraordinarily fine performances.

Gardley borrows the plot for The House from The House of Bernarda Alba (written 1936) by Federico García Lorca. As in García Lorca, Gardley’s play focusses on a steely matriarch’s oppression of her daughters – five in García Lorca, three in Gardley. In both households the male head of the family has died and the matriarch imposes the family’s long period of mourning. For the daughters who are eager to marry and leave their mother’s house, a long period of being housebound is exactly what they do not want and only heightens their desire to escape. As in García Lorca, two of the daughters are in love with the same man and disobey their mother to be with him. Also, as in García Lorca the matriarch has a sole confidante – her maid in García Lorca, her slave in Gardley. Besides her daughters, the matriarch has to cope with a madwoman upstairs – her mother in García Lorca, her sister in Gardley – who also wants to marry.

Gardley relocates the action to New Orleans – in 1836 in the play’s world premiere, in 1813 in its staging at the Shaw. The relocation confronts the audience with an aspect of Louisiana’s social history that few will ever have heard of. In Louisiana along with other French and Spanish colonies in the 18th century, a class of free people of colour arose. These mixed-race or Creole people saw themselves as distinct from both the White settlers and the Black slaves. Gardley’s play presents audiences with what is likely their first glimpse of a mixed-race family owning a Black slave.

In the New World colonies, particularly in Louisiana, White males significantly outnumbered White females. Since miscegenation was forbidden in France as in England, as system known as “plaçage” developed. When a Creole girl came of age, her mother would take her to a so-called “quadroon ball” where she could meet White men. The mother would negotiate a price for her daughter and sell her to a White suitor to whom she was to act as a wife while her buyer was to provide her a house and other necessaries. The daughter was thus “placée” (or “placed’). The relationship between the couple could end if the White “husband” later found a White woman to marry, or it could carry on with the “husband” providing for two families. As Gardley points out, for a mother to “place” her daughter in this system is not unlike being a slave-trader.

The matriarch of the family, Beartrice [sic] Albans, was a “placée” herself and it is her “husband” Lazare, who has just died. Lazare also has a White wife, whom we never meet and whom he came to detest. When the daughters say they wish to marry, what they really mean is that they wish to attend the upcoming quadroon ball and become “placée”. Beartrice’s imposition of seven months of mourning means they will miss this important occasion. Unlike Bernarda Alba in García Lorca, Gardley’s Beartrice actually has her daughters’ best interests in mind. She knows from experience that becoming a “placée” does not ensure happiness. In fact, the rumours are that Lazare did not die a natural death and that Beartrice had a hand in it.

Just as the location of the action is important so is the time. In this case the date of 1813 is much more logical that the 1836 of the play’s premiere. The characters in Gardley’s play are subject to historical forces not present in García Lorca. In 1812, Louisiana joined the United States of America as its 18th state. In the context of the play the laws of the US will replace those Louisianans lived under when it was a territory. This includes the imposition of the “one drop” rule for determining race which will mean that the Creoles’ special status will vanish. This fact creates the urgency of Beartrice’s slave Makeda to be freed that day and of the daughters to become “placées”.

Gardley’s relocation of the action of García Lorca’s play has the major disadvantage that few will understand the special status that Beartrice’s family has or the system of “plaçage”, and Gardley does not sufficiently explain them within the play. Instead of rushing off at intermision to skim the article by Bob Hetherington about “plaçage” in the programme, anyone planning to see the play should read his article online before attending.

Gardley’s play provides a host of meaty roles for women. Monica Parks is outstanding as Beartrice. Parks plays Beartrice as a fully rounded character, not simply a tyrannical mother. Parks lets us see that Beatrice has to put on a strong front before her wilful daughters and her prying acquaintance La Veuve, but with Makeda she softens and Beartrice’s genuine concern for Makeda and her daughters breaks through.

Sophia Walker performance as Makeda is simply magnificent. One part of her Makeda is the stereotypical wily servant whose secrets can be bought for the right price, but another part is a woman yearning to be free who will do whatever she has to to achieve her goal. Particularly impressive is the scene where Walker uses voodoo to have the spirit of the dead Lazare inhabit her body to tell La Veuve how he really died. Walker’s physical contortions and radical alteration of her voice make the scene unforgettably eerie.

Gardley has Beartrice’s snooping acquaintance La Veuve drop by Beartrice’s home primarily as a means of giving Makeda the chance to fill in the background to the story. Nehassaiu deGannes plays La Veuve as flighty and superficial as well as dangerous since La Veuve seems constantly digging for any information she can use against Beartrice in future.

The actors playing the three sisters – Deborah Castrilli, Ryann Myers and Rais Clarke-Mendes – are all guilty of shouting rather than projecting, but Castrilli does succeed in making Agnès the most sympathetic of the three. As Odette, Myers only comes into her own after she has disobeyed Beartrice and is cruelly punishes. Rais Clarke-Mendes as the over-religious Maude Lynn stands out for being unable to speak in the same Southern accent or rhythm as the other actors.

This is also true of Cheryl Mullings as Beartrice’s supposedly mad sister Marie. Mullings has no firm handle on her character. Is Marie actually mad or simply misunderstood? What effect has her long confinement produced? Mullings, in fact, speaks Marie’s lines as if Marie were perfectly sane. Mullings gives us no clue as to why all the other characters perceive Marie as mad. It doesn’t help Mullings that she has to wear a terrible wig with her hair falling to her ankles. Does designer Sean Mulcahy really want us to think of Marie as Rapunzel?

In the end, Gardley fails to combine the historical and the supernatural in a powerful and satisfying whole as does August Wilson in a play like Gem of the Ocean (2003). Subplots, like those involving Lazare’s White wife and La Veuve, are mentioned but not sufficiently explored. Gardley’s poetic prose is often impressive but also can seem to be striving for effect. While understanding the action requires the audience to learn quite a lot very quickly about an untaught aspect of social culture in the American South, you do come away from the play with the realization that the situation is much more complex than you previous thought. And that is not a bad thing.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Monica Parks as Beartrice; Rais Clarke-Mendes as Maude Lynn, Ryann Myers as Odette and Deborah Castrilli as Agnès; Sophia Walker as Makeda. © 2024 David Cooper.

For tickets visit: www.shawfest.com.