‘To Take Arms’ Struggles to Find Real-Life Drama

Tales of oppression are innately dramatic. That doesn’t mean--ipso facto--they make good plays.

In “To Take Arms,” at the Tamarind Theatre, the narrator (Peggy Blow) tells us we should embrace the tale she is about to impart not as a slave narrative but as a story of the American people. No quarrel there. Playwright Susan Flakes is determined to prove the luminous humanity of her heroine Harriet Jacobs and expose the inhumanity and lechery of the slave owner, Dr. Norcom, which she easily does. What Flakes has to offer beyond that is minimal.

Flakes has adapted the story of Harriet Ann Jacobs, written under the pseudonym Linda Brent in the 1861 autobiography “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” A young slave in North Carolina, Harriet (the lovely Sanaa Lathan) is given the unusual privilege of an education, and she particularly loves Lord Byron and Shakespeare. Her relatively idyllic existence is interrupted on the day that the treacherous Norcom (Peter Savard) decides she is old enough to become his concubine. Rather than take her there and then, he tells her what he expects of her four months hence, when he gets back from a trip.

Harriet decides she would rather give her body willingly to the white man she thinks she loves, the insipid Sam (an overheated BK Kennelly). She figures that if she gets pregnant by Sam, Norcom will not want her.

He does not. Yet the doctor remains obsessed with Harriet and her punishment for the next seven years, which she spends hidden in a tiny crawl space in the home of her grandmother (Hattie Winston).

An inspiring true-life story, as TV likes to say, it is nevertheless clunky onstage. Norcom, who does everything but twirl a long mustache and tie Harriet to the railroad tracks, remains cartoonish, as does his overfed, shrewish, laudanum-addicted wife, Mary (Susanne Wright), who says the nastiest things in a kittenish voice and seems to be in a Charles Ludlam play.

As directed by Diane Wynter, many crucial events--from an onstage death during a wimpy tussle to Sam’s congressional career--are simply not believable. “To Take Arms” also features Ylfa Edelstein as Sam’s bloodless wife and Letha Remington as Harriet’s Aunt Betty, a Norcom slave who pretends loyalty. The incidental music by Galt MacDermot is pretty throughout.

Actually, no one ever does take arms in this play, a melodrama of the best-intentioned variety. The title comes from Harriet’s favorite Hamlet monologue, which she reads to give her strength in the crawl space. “To Take Arms” tells an amazing human story. But unless its sole purpose is to instruct (and, indeed, a one-woman version of “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” has been touring Southland schoolrooms for several years), this story would be better served by a writer who begins from the assumption that, in 1997, the humanity of the slave is a given.

* “To Take Arms,” Tamarind Theatre, 5919 Franklin Ave., Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends March 2. $20. (213) 466-1767. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.