Why aren’t the genres that traffic outside reality more popular on the modern stage? You’d think four-plus centuries of persistence by an author who dealt in fairies, ghosts, witches, enchanters, spirits, gods, and statues coming to life would have taught us something about theater’s potential to do more than show us basically ourselves with heightened vocabularies and stakes. The mirror that Shakespeare described—the one that a play holds up to nature—might be a cracked or crooked one, or a fun house ripple, a convex lens, or a prism. It’s thrilling when theater steers hard into the supernatural, mimesis and budgets be damned! And if those things still feel like necessary elements of the equation, horror has a bit of an advantage over its more overtly fantastical colleagues. Horror’s final frontier is, after all, the sub-basement of the human psyche. It can do much of its work by burrowing inwards rather than expanding outwards, by locking the door, cutting the power, and leaving us alone in the dark.
Trapping its characters in the lightless torture chambers of their own souls is the project of York Walker’s Covenant. It’s a project with lots of spooky potential, dampened by strains of floridity and heavy-handedness along with a feeling of indecision over whether it aims to throw its lot in with human psychology or with real and present monsters. Still, there are thrills to be had in Tiffany Nichole Greene’s production. When Greene and her cohort of designers and actors lean all the way into a heightened, jump-scare register, they go a long way towards finding Covenant’s playfulness: the unabashed part of it that just wants to tell a good-and-scary campfire story.
That story is set in Georgia in the 1930s — though, really, it takes place inside a ball of shadow that encloses its five characters. It’s got that small-town-mystery quality, where everyone’s secrets and traumas are conveniently linked up and all you have to do is wait for the pieces to fall into place. Secrets are big in Covenant, which doesn’t so much have a complex thematic core as it does a set of motifs. “Everybody got a secret,†a tense, tear-stained young woman tells us as the play begins. “That thing that’s like a hot iron through your soul…. eatin’ you alive.†This is Ruthie (Lark White, who’s got an A-plus scream), and she makes it clear that we’re not exactly setting out on a journey of redemption. “Everything started,†she says, rancor thickening her voice, “with him.â€
He is Johnny “Honeycomb†James (Chaundre Hall-Broomfield), prodigal son of Nameless Small Town, back home after two years and—according to his old best friend, the plucky, restless Avery (Jade Payton)—totally transformed. “Wait a minute,†Avery marvels, “is … is your stammer gone?†Johnny left town a shy, shaky oddball. He’s come back as a smooth-talking musician whose star is on the rise. We know this story: Covenant is a riff on the devil-at-the-crossroads legend, specifically the story of Robert Johnson, the early 20th-century blues guitarist who was rumored to have sold his soul to Satan in exchange for his musical prowess. Even if we didn’t know, it doesn’t take long for Avery to make things explicit: “Bug swear he saw you when he was in Mississippi,†she tells Johnny. “He said you was somethin’ else…. The sound that came out of your fingers…. Said that you musta struck up a deal with the devil himself…. That you traded your soul for the music.â€
Did Honeycomb make an infernal pact in exchange for his deepest desire, or is he just the victim of puritanical backwater gossip? Walker’s twist is that that question can be asked about pretty much everyone in Covenant. As the show tracks what happens between Johnny and Avery, it also pauses for regular interludes where all the characters, each in their turn, get caught in a spotlight and turn to us somberly: “I heard a story once,†or “I heard a whisper once,†or “I once knew a man…†they’ll say. The narrator act isn’t fooling anyone — this is where we get to learn all those deep, dark secrets Ruthie was talking about. Stop! It’s trauma time.
It’s in these soliloquies where the play starts to feel bogged down by its own writerly flourishes, its own solemnity. The actors—whose energies and attacks on the text feel distinct when they’re playing the plot—sink into a similar state of self-serious gloom. Though they all fight hard to ride a throughline of personal ache, they’re too often saddled with language that aims for poetry but doesn’t really scan—“words and sounds written on her tongue that he’d never seen before,†“steeped in the baby’s criesâ€â€”or that just drips a bit too much purple ink: “the patchwork of his passin’ looks and quiet stares,†“their bodies hangin’ from the rope that cut them off from life and held them hostage to the tree…â€
Avery, Johnny, and Avery’s younger sister Violet (a gutsy Ashley N. Hildreth) all have to wade through this squelchy terrain, as does Avery and Violet’s stringently devout mother (the excellent Crystal Dickinson). It’s particularly sigh-inducing to watch Dickinson tackle her interlude, because she’s just so much sharper, stronger, and funnier than the text she’s performing. She takes it valiantly and simply, losing no dignity in the process — but all the characters are flattened out by their defining traumas, which land on them like Acme anvils. When we first meet Mama, she’s bristling with righteous energy. The t’s on the ends of Dickinson’s words could puncture the hull of a submarine, and they’re doubly delightful when they’re attached to words that in fact end in d’s. “Get right with the Lord(t!)†Mama demands, and we all snap to attention. I watched one woman in the front row essentially turn into that Meryl Streep GIF whenever Dickinson spoke — there’s great energy there, along with a sense of humor, but the play is willing to sacrifice these things in exchange for what it thinks of as gravitas. It’s another bargain with the devil.
Much to Mama’s dismay, Johnny and Avery run off together, seeking love, music, and freedom. And when an accident with a horse (or could it be Satan?) brings them back home with Avery in an ever–more–Linda Blair–like state, the play’s pulse, and ours, finally starts to quicken. Now Greene gets to encourage her designers to have some big fun with the horror playbook. Doors creak and slam, winds blow through, thunder crashes, lights flicker and dive into darkness, and Payton enacts some genuinely creepy “She’s here—wait, she’s over there!†moments. As Ruthie, White also hurls herself all the way into shaking, wide-eyed, tear-and-snot-faced terror with a force that pulls us along after her. Her wild screeches in the dark cause real goosebumps.
There’s a Covenant that wants to be a pleasurably old-fashioned scary story, and there’s a Covenant that wants to complicate our notions of that most ancient bogeyman, the devil, by revealing him as an aspect of ourselves — a manifestation of all the suffering caused by our cruelties and lies. Either approach is fine, but trying to do both at once requires a technical balancing act, a puppet-master’s exacting control over our sense of what’s real—when to pull the audience one way, and when to pull us back the other way—that Walker hasn’t quite nailed. Besides, we’re all in for the scary story! Covenant deals with the destructive results of shame, and it functions best when it’s least ashamed of its own idiom. The farther the show leans towards pure horror—in all its blackout-and-blood-curdling-scream deliciousness—the more exciting and free it feels.
Covenant is at the Roundabout’s Steinberg Center through December 3.