STAGE REVIEW : Encountering a New ‘Eden’

It was in 1980 that the Los Angeles Theatre Center (then housed on North Oxford Avenue in Hollywood and known as the Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre) staged the West Coast premiere of Steve Carter’s “Eden.” A lot has happened in the interim to alter our perceptions of this play--not necessarily for the better.

The new “Eden” that opened at LATC over the weekend, features the same director (Edmund J. Cambridge), producer (Diane White) and leading actor (Carl W. Lumbly), every bit as strong today as he was then as Joseph Barton, the unyielding head of a West Indian family living in New York in 1927).

Indeed, the entire production benefits from the sureness of Cambridge’s direction, the hand-picked company performing zestfully on a well-laid-out set by John Iacovelli that manages to convey a sense of black middle-class life on San Juan Hill (Manhattan’s Upper West Side, in the vicinity of what is now Lincoln Center). Douglas D. Smith has augmented it with a rigorous lighting scheme to match the play’s murky inner motion, and Marianna Elliott has delivered appropriately conservative costumes. There is nothing wrong with the production. The play is another matter.

The embittered Joseph had been a dedicated follower of the evangelistic black Jamaican leader Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Assn. (a fact we learn from the program notes more than the text). This aggressively organized movement, which intended to triumphantly return Africans to Africa, reached its peak in 1920, but began to come apart in a shambles of corruption that saw Garvey convicted on charges of mail fraud by 1925 and deported to Jamaica in 1927. It was the death of a dream of Eden for many, but especially for a man as tightly coiled as Joseph Barton.

This stern patriarch runs his own little dictatorship within his unhappy household, perverting racial pride into reverse bigotry, making life untenable for his wife Florie (Juanita Jennings), his grown daughters Annetta (Akosua Busia) and Agnes (Akuye) and his young sons Nimrod (Charles Randle) and Solomon (Marlon Alfonzo Taylor). Joseph demands and receives tacit obedience. He also expects to decide who will marry his favorite (Annetta), unaware that a winsome young American black, Eustace Baylor (Victor Love), has just moved in next door with his nosy, happy-go-lucky aunt Lizzie (Ann Weldon) and that Annetta and Eustace have eyes for each other.

Annetta’s defiance of her father’s wishes, aided and abetted by her sister, brothers and mother (who does not want Annetta to repeat her own loveless and unhappy marriage), predictably ends in disaster. Annetta becomes pregnant and decides to marry Eustace whom she believes she loves. This news is clumsily delivered to papa Joseph (who has already had a few other rude awakenings), causing him to suffer a paralyzing stroke.

It is at this point that “Eden” falls apart. Carter has skillfully carried us this far, building his case against Joseph (a sort of homespun Coriolanus for whom there can be pity but no defense), showing us an eager, playful and life-loving Eustace, a strong and super-smart Annetta who knows how to be her own woman. In the final scene of the play, Carter scrambles his message.

It dwells on an about-face that is dramatically unconvincing. Joseph, now a speechless, motionless man in a wheelchair, has been felled by his own obstinacy. But his eyes are alert, opening and closing as cold and remorseless as ever. Nimrod baby-sits him with something that borders on disregard. Next door, the wedding party rages.

That might have been the image on which to end the play. But Carter has Annetta drop in to see her father with a confession (and promise) that are as jarring as they are dramaturgically unsound--the creations of a writer who, perhaps unsure how to end his play, compromises it with expendable posturing.

Carter is free, of course, to choose his ending, but shouldn’t it follow the path that he started out on? There is no precedent for the emotional shift in Eustace and not much (except guilt) for Annetta’s return to the psychological fold. If Carter’s point is that one can never escape the claws of a tyrannical father (arguable at best), it reduces the play from one that would take on significant questions of race and intra-ethnic prejudice to mere kitchen-sink drama. A choice, yes, but hardly the choicest. What happened to the political background?

At 514 S. Spring St., Tuesdays through Sundays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays 2 p.m., until July 16. Tickets: $22-$25; (213) 627-5599.