The cast of Eden, running at the Yale Rep Theatre through Feb. 8. Joan Marcus Photos.
It is 1927, and in San Juan Hill, New York, next-door neighbors Annetta Barton and Eustace Baylor have fallen headlong in love. But Annetta’s father Joseph, a fearsome West Indian patriarch, disapproves of the match. His Caribbean daughters are not to be corrupted by the “inferior” Black Americans. It’s this that leads him to pace through the dining room, railing against love.
“Can you buy bread with it? Will it pay rent?” he asks. His wife Florie, who has been knitting placidly by the dinner table all this while, observes their own marriage has been devoid of love. “I gave as I was given,” he flippantly replies.
“And I took what I got … to my shame,” she responds. In that pause, and in those last three words, we hear the banked fire in Florie’s voice. Decades of regret smolder under the ashes of domesticity and her husband’s misguided ambitions.
steve carter’s Eden, running at Yale Repertory Theatre through Feb. 8, is at once a forbidden romance, a soapy family drama, and a commentary on the costs of assimilation (the lowercase is intended; carter did not capitalize his name). As the first play in his Caribbean trilogy, it moves briskly, taut with the tension of inter-ethnic conflict and still shot through with humor, joy, and levity.
Christina Acosta Robinson and Russell G. Jones in Eden, running at the Yale Rep Theatre through Feb. 8. Joan Marcus Photos.
The main conflict revolves around two families and a love story that comes between them. In the Barton family, Patriarch Joseph (Russell G. Jones) is a Garveyite, who believes oppression can be overcome through good breeding and is dismissive of “women’s work.” He finds his foil in Southerner Eustace Baylor (Chaundre Hall-Broomfield), who recognizes the extraordinary persistence of American racism and is not above washing the dishes.
Eustace presents an escape from drudgery for Joseph's daughter, Annetta (Lauren F. Walker), and a way into the world of sex and womanhood. Annetta’s sister Agnes (Alicia Pilgrim), meanwhile, wants to work; her brothers Nimrod (Juice Mackins) and Solomon (Prentiss Patrick-Carter) want to fit in with the neighbourhood boys. His wife, Florie Barton (Christina Acosta Robinson), wants for her daughters what she never had: love.
So, Eden asks, is our past determinative? Can cycles be interrupted? Is human intimacy without hierarchy possible?
The two-and-a-half hour run time flies by, and much of that is owing to carter’s writing. When the play first released in 1976, it was so popular that it moved to a bigger stage off Broadway and had a run of 181 performances. According to Tia Smith, M.F.A. candidate at the David Geffen School of Drama and dramaturg for the production, one reason Eden resonated with audiences was because it “revealed not only how Black people see ourselves but how we see each other.”
Lauren F. Walker and Chaundre Hall-Broomfield in Eden, running at the Yale Rep Theatre through Feb. 8. Joan Marcus Photos.
Jones is scene-stealing as the Barton patriarch, wagging accusatory fingers at his opponents and flaying them with crisp Caribbean diction. His every mannerism feels specific. Even when he is absent from the stage, the audience is thinking of him, fearing his return. Around him, Walker’s Annetta is a true heroine, gentle and fundamentally decent; one can’t help but root for her. She has an easy chemistry with Hall-Broomfield, who portrays Eustace’s insecurities with a charming boyishness.
The rest of the cast turn out strong supporting performances. Pilgrim, Mackins, and Patrick-Carter together create a believable familial dynamic as the bickering Barton siblings. Christina Acosta Robinson is understated as Florie, imbuing the character with a maturity that comes from having experienced loss; Heather Alicia Simms, as Eustace’s playful Aunt Lizzie, draws some of the biggest laughs from the audience with fine comedic timing.
Light and space underscore Eden’s themes. Ankit Pandey, lighting designer, uses projections that span the stage and appear as white, fluttering outlines—the exterior of a tenement, branches of autumn leaves—to ground us in place, and mark the passage of time. As scenes fade to black, scribbled outlines of figures are projected onto actors. These form a haunting afterimage, fixing the characters in a tableau and prolonging the scene’s emotional beat.
Christina Acosta Robinson and Heather Alicia Simms in Eden, running at the Yale Rep Theatre through Feb. 8. Joan Marcus Photos.
Brandon Dirden’s direction is adept at making the Barton dining room seem small, and the darkened hallway leading to the bedrooms oppressive. It is often a relief when characters exit the home into the hallway. (One of the great pleasures of the play is a hallway scene where Florie and Aunt Lizzie swap bawdy sex stories from their youth.) And, in Act 2, a new set above the confines of the Barton apartment is revealed: a rooftop, a tiny Eden, where Annetta and Eustace escape to murmur in private and make love.
Freedom, however, is not at the end of a flight of stairs. Eden resists easy answers about love and the conditions for liberation. As tension mounts, characters' experiences are not linear: they experience victories and defeats, yes, but also hesitation, uncertainty, and reversals. And it is in this uneasy ambivalence that Eden makes us sit, when the curtain falls.