"Redwood" was worth the wait.
Nearly two years after shutting down during previews because of the pandemic — with its set sitting onstage ever since — Jungle Theater's production of Brittany K. Allen's dramedy opened last weekend in Minneapolis.
Director H. Adam Harris' smart and efficient staging unfolds on a candle-bedecked set as a frothy, over-the-top comedy in the first act and a touching drama in the second. Harris maximizes the humor before taking square aim at the heart.
He gets well-timed and nuanced performances from his cast led by China Brickey, who delivers a beautifully chiseled turn as lead character Meg. The show has a versatile Greek chorus that includes Dwight Xaveir Leslie, who also plays a hip-hop dance class instructor; Dana Lee Thompson, who also depicts family matriarch Alameda; Morgen Chang, who doubles a stepmom; and the inimitable Max Wojtanowicz, playing an insouciant barista and an old slaveowner.
"Redwood" orbits interracial Baltimore couple Meg, a Black teacher, and Drew (Kevin Fanshaw), a white doctoral candidate in physics. Always ready to start dancing together, these two hipsters are secretly shacking up to the consternation of Meg's mother, Beverly (Thomasina Petrus), a practicing Christian.
The couple's rhythms are disturbed after Beverly's fraternal twin, Uncle Stevie (Bruce A. Young), discovers that the youngsters may be literal kissing cousins: Drew's family owned Meg's family during slavery.
Playwrights are often among the world's deftest smugglers, slipping weighty matters into the theater on the backs of light comedy. Think "Tartuffe" and its withering attack on religious hypocrisy. Allen's play is less bracing, coming from a place of intimacy and love.
But its subject — the buried history around slavery that exerts a powerful though unseen gravitational influence on those walking above ground — is becoming increasingly popular and more personal as people use genealogical research to unlock family histories.
