This month, cast members of the Pure Life Theatre Company’s production have offered up a poignant and oftentimes laugh-out-loud performance of the Tony-nominated play, Home. The play closes out on Thursday, June 20, as part of Burning Coal Theatre’s Second Stage Series.
The iridescent June 8 opening night performance at Raleigh’s Burning Coal Theatre by Ajani Kambon, Moriah Williams, and Tydiam Coleman, under the direction of Jade Arnold, was especially meaningful coming less than a month after Samm-Art Williams, who wrote Home, died on May 13 in Burgaw, North Carolina.
Williams, a playwright and executive producer for shows like Martin and Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, was 78.
Home was first performed in 1979 by the legendary, New York-based Negro Ensemble Company.
In addition to performances at Burning Coal on June 15, 16, 19, and 20th, Home is currently in the midst of a Broadway revival produced by the Roundabout Theatre Company, with an opening night performance on June 5 at the Todd Haimes Theatre.
Prior to the play’s opening night production at Burning Coal, Triangle theatre titan Wendell Tabb introduced Linda Kerr Norflett, chair emerita of the North Carolina Central University Theatre Department, who was a friend of Samm-Art Williams and hired him as Artist-in-Residence during the 1980s in a stint that continued into the early 2000s.
“He taught playwriting, and how to take a play from the page to the stage,” Norflett told the audience. “He thought it was important for the students to understand how to make a play live. And he created a booklet on how to make a [theatre] budget.”
Norflett described Williams as a man whose genial personality well fit well his imposing, six-foot-six, 300-pound stature. Williams once served as a sparring partner for Muhammad Ali and lived in New York and California before returning home to Burgaw to take care of his mother.
“He was a neat man,” said Norflett, who visited his home. “Everything was polished and clean. He had a little desk where he worked and where much of his work came from.”
“He was such a humble guy, such a funny guy,” Norflett continued. “He had all of these stories about the country farm; bringing the cows out first thing in the morning, milking the cows, curing tobacco, killing hogs. He was a jovial, crazy, joker.”
Norflett first met Williams in the late 1970s, when she took a group of students to New York. Her mother, who is now 101, volunteered to chaperone and had wandered backstage before a performance by the Negro Ensemble Company. Norflett’s mother, who is from Mount Olive, emerged from backstage and announced that she had met someone from her hometown.
“This huge man came from behind the stage,” Norflett said. “It was Samm.”
During Tabb’s introduction of Norflett, he explained that he had recently visited New York and saw The Wiz, the Tony-award-winning musical. Home was also up and running, but Tabb said he elected to see the Burning Coal production instead.
And in Raleigh, the home players, no pun intended, did not disappoint.
Home is a coming-of-age story about Cephus Miles, a farm boy who grew up in Crossroads, North Carolina.
In his debut as a lead actor, Ajani Kambon embodies Cephus’s hopes and loves, frustration and sadness, hilarious humor and poetry, heartbreak and triumph with the heart of a lion.
Kambon capably transitions from an old man sitting on his porch in Crossroads, to a teenager in love with Patti Mae, luminously played by Moriah Williams, and then to an older working class Black man working in the city after serving time in prison for refusing to fight in Vietnam.
Kambon, however, is at his best as a raconteur sharing stories about growing up. He leaves the audience aching with laughter.
Unquestionably, and even with the sparkling performances offered up by Kambon and Williams, Tydiam Coleman commanded the stage with a stunning mix of singing voice, movement phrases, narrative work, and smoking seduction that demanded the audience’s attention.
“She was the most valuable player tonight,” Arnold, the director, told me after the curtain fell.
Kudos is due, too, for the minimalist set design that established country, city, and prison settings, along with the on-stage props used to build character and place.
Broadway’s revival notwithstanding, Burning Coal’s Home is a beautifully rendered tribute to the legacy of Samm-Art Williams.
To paraphrase Langston Hughes, Home shows that, even with life’s hardships, it is not without laughter.
Comment on this story at [email protected].
You must be logged in to post a comment.