“THE HOUSE THAT WILL NOT STAND”
*** (out of 5)
Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre, 2 hours 30 minutes, one intermission. Ends Oct 12. Writer: Marcus Gardley. Director: Philip Akin. A drama about the free women of colour in New Orleans, 1813.

New Orleans. Its name conjures up languid, hot, steamy nights, Delta blues, African drums, gumbo, jambalaya, folk Catholicism, voodoo, ethnic ease, French refinements and Latin sensuality.

The famed port on the Mississippi was to become the third-largest, most cultured and wealthiest city of America. But in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Louisiana Territory was a pawn of European powers with France, Spain and Britain at war and America with an expansionist ambition.

Napoleon, beset with his army’s defeat in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and a huge loss of West Indies income, plus a pending war with Britain, decided to sell, abandoning New Orleans and America.

The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 gave the Americans New Orleans and a vast territory west of the Mississippi to Wyoming and Montana, and north to southern Saskatchewan and Alberta.

In Marcus Gardley’s play of major societal change and uncertainty in 1813 New Orleans, the house of controlling matriarch Beartrice Albans must remain standing.

The certainties of French and Creole culture, a way of life entrenched since 1718, equalities achieved within the Napoleonic Code and the future life of her family are now threatened by her husband’s death and the Yankee north.

Inspired by Federico Garcia Lorca’s 1936 classic, “The House of Bernarda Alba,” where a widow in a Spanish village enforces eight years of mourning on her daughters, Gardley places the house of Beartrice Albans in Faubourg Tremé, a racially mixed area of New Orleans.

Beartrice, a domineering, free woman of colour and recent widow, imposes a repressive six months of mourning on three daughters, her mad, confined sister and a Black female servant.

The realistic corpse laid out in the drawing room is Lazare Albans, common-law husband and father of her daughters, who may or may not have died of unnatural causes after eating her sweet potato pie.

He is a white, married man with a white family, but under the unique formal system of plaçage he also supports and lives with his mistress and children.

Beartrice and her family can inherit one-third of his property, but the laws will change with the imposition of different American moral and racial values.

She wants to keep her daughters close, dependent on her not the plaçage system, which she views as a type of slavery. But the young daughters are resistant and rebellious.

They want freedom and love, to meet young men and dance at the Quadroon Balls. Spirits within and without the house must be invoked to resolve the unfolding conflicts that threaten stability of the house.

Monica Parks as the iron-willed Beartrice capably conveys toughness, contempt and fatigue. She keeps a wary cool when her frenemy, the wealthy concubine, La Veuve (Nehassaiu deGannes) visits to spy and gossip.

For years, Beartrice’s sister has been locked up as punishment for passionately falling in love with a Black drummer. Cheryl Mullins plays Marie Josephine in a convincing whirling dance of longing, her long rasta dreadlocks swirling wildly around her, a symbol of defiance.

As the daughters, Agnès (Deborah Castrilli) wants to be a plaćee for love. Meek, pious Maude Lynn (Rais Clarke-Mendes) is too weak when she needs authority. The risk-all Odette escaping for a sexual fling is given an excited, edgy performance by Ryann Myers.

The star of the show is Sophia Walker as the servant Makeda who strives to buy her freedom. Her solid acting throughout achieves high believability as she performs the divining voodoo rituals to reach the West African spirits who will give necessary guidance.

In the altar preparation, invocation and possession in which she trembles, convulses and writhes on the floor to an exhausted aftermath, she is superb.

Hairstyles and costumes are true to the time, especially the tignon headwraps, simple white dresses, Spanish black lace shawls and dark mourning gowns.

The staging in the round with the Louis XV fauteuils and the Neo-classical récamier chaise-longue indicate the refined taste of Beartrice.

Evocative lighting and lightning, music, claps of thunder, faint chirps of birds all give life to what lay outside the walls of the house.

Gardley has written a remarkable play of discovery, a tribute to his New Orleans mother and grandmothers, commissioned for the Berkeley Rep Theatre and since performed in New Haven, Chicago, London and New York.

The Shaw has given us a very fine first professional production in Canada.

Penny-Lynn Cookson is an arts and culture historian, writer and lecturer living in Niagara-on-the-Lake.