Tree of life seeds racial drama

No matter how painful, the past must be remembered. So in 1955 Louisiana, a family keeps up a tradition of prayer meetings beside an oak that had been a hanging tree in the slave era. Hence the title of Layon Gray’s “Meet Me at the Oak.”

Presented at the Whitmore-Lindley Theatre by the new Los Angeles African American Repertory Company, this is a poignant play, powerfully performed. If it stumbles now and again, it’s mostly due to limitations of space and budget.

Selma and Jonius Batiste (Thea-Marie Perkins and Jesse N. Holmes) are grandparents raising 11-year-old Ruthie (Sara Williams, alternating with Sahara Garey) while her widower father, Junior (Gray, alternating with Averil Houston), is away at college. They live in an African American neighborhood, on land long owned by the family. The oak stands at its border.

Ruthie knows and embraces the tree’s story, and can often be found in its branches. That’s where she is one day when she is befriended by a new, white neighbor, Katie Beaudoin (Jillian Clare, alternating with Tierra Abbott). An accident quickly escalates tensions between their families, however.

Some themes echo such plays as Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” and August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” but Gray, a Los Angeles playwright, mostly goes his own way with a story that offers new twists on such aphorisms as “The Lord works in mysterious ways” and “A child shall lead them.” Gray, who directs this production, also makes plentiful use of music, dance and laughter, especially whenever neighbor Luther Lejune (Ken Sagoes, alternating with David Wendell) drops in for a visit.

The actors are, at times, so crowded that they bump into each other or threaten to plunge into the first row of the audience, destroying verisimilitude. But given the emotions they’re wrenching from the audience, perhaps that’s a blessing in disguise. A shirt collar can absorb only so many tears.

-- Daryl H. Miller

“Meet Me at the Oak,” Whitmore-Lindley Theatre, 11006 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood. Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Runs indefinitely. $20. (818) 761-0704. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.