Love Is On The Brain

Eden
Yale Repertory Theatre
Through Feb. 8

Over the course of Eden, which opened this week at the Yale Rep, characters insist on the old adage that love makes you stupid.

One character claims, ​“You must be in love, because you ain’t using your head.” Another notes, ​“If she was using her head, she’d be able to see the rocks in the road.” The dialogue contains dozens of references to intelligence, by way of the ​“head,” ​“brains,” ​“knowledge” and others — the majority with the implication that love and intelligence are incompatible. 

Despite what its characters may say, Yale Repertory Theatre’s production of steve carter’s (stylization à la bell hooks) 1976 play -– a revival directed by Brandon J. Dirden nearly 50 years after its original premiere with the Negro Ensemble Company -– shows quite the opposite: That love is brilliant, brave, and a key to liberation not to be overlooked.

The play centers on two young lovers and their families. Eustace Baylor (Chaundre Hall-Broomfield), who lives with his Aunt Lizzie (Heather Alicia Simms), falls hard for Annetta Barton (Lauren F. Walker), who lives right across the hall with her brothers Nimrod (Juice Mackins), and Solomon (Prentiss Patrick-Carter), sister Agnes (Alicia Pilgrim), mother Florie (Christina Acosta Robinson), and father Joseph (Russell G. Jones). It’s 1927 in Manhattan’s San Juan Hill neighborhood, a predominantly Black community that was razed and displaced to make way for Lincoln Center. 

Eustace and Aunt Lizzie are Black Americans who recently migrated from the South as part of the Great Migration. Annetta and her family are Caribbean immigrants. Joseph, a devotee of Marcus Garvey and patriarch of the family, holds tightly to the belief that Black Americans are racially inferior to them, and that Annetta must marry someone from the West Indies to keep his bloodline pure. Annetta and Eustace’s forbidden love is one that digs deep into both the racial and gendered nuances of intracommunity prejudice, and is the catalyst for each of the play’s characters to challenge their own assumptions about what it means to love, learn, and liberate.

Under Dirden’s direction, the production is funny, fast-paced, intense, and enthralling. carter’s writing pulls no punches whatsoever; it had me leaning forward in my seat, gasping in shock, and raising my eyebrows repeatedly. Dirden holds the tension and momentum of the play with an iron fist, only allowing the briefest moments of reprieve to recover from one moment to the next. The play flies by. 

Walker and Hall-Broomfield’s onstage chemistry is electric: through them we see not only how Annetta and Eustace impact each other when they’re in the same room, but also how their love sharpens their own thoughts, perceptions, and senses of self when they are apart. They each go toe to toe with Joseph in tense rhetorical battles, and it is their love that guides them to poke holes in Joseph’s ideologies about Black Americans, women, and love. Jones is highly formidable as the unshakeable and complex Joseph Barton, and his airtight performance gives every challenge to Joseph’s authority significant weight, and significant opposition. Each charged interaction between Walker, Hall-Broomfield, and Jones is thrilling.

Eden’s supporting cast is also stellar. Simms brings a humorous and hearty touch to Aunt Lizzie, who loves Eustace as much as she wants to keep him out of trouble. Pilgrim, in the role of Agnes, provides an empathetic, witty, and clever foil to Annetta. Mackins portrays a delightful dynamic rapport with his onstage siblings as Nimrod. I was especially impressed with Patrick-Carter, an undergraduate junior, for bringing such a vulnerability and clear emotional arc to Solomon, the youngest Barton sibling, and arguably the one most pressured and changed by his father’s influence over the course of the play. Robinson tore my heart out as Florie, a mother caught between the strictly enforced duty of a wife and the emotionally freeing desire to have her daughter experience the ecstasy she herself desperately longs for.

The ensemble too is at their most clever, most poetic, most courageous, most cooperative and most in solidarity with each other when supporting and being inspired by Annette and Eustace’s love. This is in stark contrast to Joseph’s own expressed beliefs and goal of having himself and his family return to Africa. Despite his steadfast and radical convictions, he mostly is unsuccessful at inspiring even members of his own household to collaborate toward his goals, except under duress. In a dramaturg’s note, Tia Smith, one of the production dramaturgs, notes a potential parallel between Joseph and Garvey himself, highlighting the fact that Joseph ​“believes that freedom and love cannot coexist” and that Garvey ​“never fully recognized his wife’s contributions, even as she combed through texts for his speeches and articles, edited and published his articles, and became the face of the movement during his imprisonment.” 

Eden’s design supports the production’s subversive message about love. The designed world of the play eschews any typical flourishes one might see on a stage to indicate the presence of love. There are no harp effects, no pink light washes, nor any fancy design metaphors to express the magic or magnitude of Annette and Eustace’s affection. The scenic design (George Zhou 周亦款,), costume Design (Caroline Tyson), lighting Design (Ankit Pandey), and hair and wig design (Krystal Balleza and Will Vicari) are all finely detailed, naturalistic, and period-appropriate. Sound design and original music (Tojo Rasedoara) and projection design (Ein Kim) add a light touch of softer and more cinematic-leaning sensitivity to the design, but these aspects are present only for transitions. Overall, the message is clear: love itself does not change the world on its own, but it is a key motivator for Annette and Eustace to go out and change the world themselves, starting from within their own homes on 63rd Street. 

Whether or not they succeed is another question entirely. In a second dramaturg’s note, Austin Riffelmacher, the other production dramaturg, notes that although ​“there are no white characters in this play… How the Barton family views the Baylor family, and vice versa, is the consequence of white supremacist and colonialist power.” While Annette and Eustace’s love motivates Eden’s characters to resist Joseph’s influence and ideology, they are also placing themselves in opposition to something that reaches far beyond the 6th floor of their San Juan Hill tenement. To learn how far that brilliant, brave, and liberatory love takes them, you’ll have to go see the production for yourself. 

Eden runs through Feb. 8, and you can get tickets here.