Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 16, 1993 TAG: 9301160093
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHRIS GLADDEN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
GOOD PERFORMANCES TOP OFF SENSITIVE STORY
The timing couldn't be better. Mill Mountain Theatre is staging "In the Presence" just as the nation begins to celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday.Written by Kentucky native Sallie Bingham, this is the winner of the new play competition that's part of the Norfolk Southern Festival of New Works.
Bingham's play is an effective reminder that the need for social commitment didn't die in the 1960s along with some of the great leaders of that decade.
The catalyst that sets the story in motion is the burning of a black family's house.
It echoes a similar crime that occurred several years past. Reporter Ellie Summers, played with spunk by Dawn Westbrook, sees a story in the parallel incidents and pays a visit to Lou Alden. Lou was once a civil-rights activist. She and her husband helped finance the house of a black family and it, too, was burned.
Since then, life has not been kind to Lou, who is played with flavor and force by Jayne Heller. She's lost both her husband and her daughter and is still trying to come to terms with their deaths. The husband and daughter are touchingly played by Jim Galloway and Abigail Johnson of Roanoke, who evoke Lou's turbulent past as they drift in and out of the story. The husband came from a family of old-style radicals and the daughter was a troubled teen-ager who couldn't measure up to Lou's expectations.
The other cast member is Be Boyd, who convincingly plays Lenora Atkins, the timid woman whose family's house was burned.
Bingham's play, directed with typical sensitivity to the material by Mary Best-Bova, is unabashedly political, addressing feminist issues as well as the plight of the Atkins family. But it's by no means a screed. Bingham lets the characters become people, not symbols.
Ellie is pregnant; she wants a baby but not a man, a situation Lou's not comfortable with.
I must admit that I wasn't comfortable with the idea that this pregnant reporter smokes and loses her journalistic objectivity to the extent that she wants to name her baby after the subject of one of her stories. But they're personal quibbles.
Meanwhile, Lou must grapple with her own failure as a mother. It's a plot element similar to that in "A World Apart," the excellent movie about a daughter's sacrifices to her mother's anti-apartheid activism. Subtexts such as these provide dramatic tension and give the characters depth.
Bingham is an experienced writer, and she knows how far to go with her subject and characters. The result is a sensitive, compact drama that sticks to business.
"IN THE PRESENCE," the first of the Norfolk Southern Festival of New Works, runs through Jan. 24 at Mill Mountain Theatre's Theatre B. 342-5740.