THE HANGOVER REPORT – Patricia Ione Lloyd’s broadly-acted EVE’S SONG is a metaphorical ghost story, and it’s haunting and unsettling

Ashley D. Kelley and Kadijah Raquel in Patricia Ione Lloyd's "Eve's Song" at the Public Theater.

Ashley D. Kelley and Kadijah Raquel in Patricia Ione Lloyd’s “Eve’s Song” at the Public Theater.

This past weekend, I caught the penultimate performance of Patricia Ione Lloyd’s Eve’s Song at the Public Theater. The play is one of several this fall to explore the realities of being black in America today, particularly as it relates to police brutality. Currently, similar dialogue is being engaged by Broadway’s American Son by Christopher Demos-Brown and Movement Theatre Company’s extended (and searing) Off-Broadway production What to Send Up When It Goes Down.

Eve’s Song tells the story of a suburban upper middle class black family who seems to have everything. However, as the play unfolds, history – personal, as well as in a broader racial sense – catches up with each member of the family. In a sense, Ms. Lloyd’s play is a horror story in which ghosts of the past metaphorically infiltrate the utopia Deborah, the matriarch, has fought so very hard to build and maintain for her tribe.

The recently-shuttered production at the Public was directed by Stefanie Batten Bland, who did a good job of navigating the play’s tricky shifts in tone (sit-com, horror, queer rom-com, even a dash of modern dance). And even if the acting veers towards broadness and caricature just a little more than I’d like (a deliberate approach taken by Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview earlier this season at Soho Rep, to shattering effect) to limited ends, I nonetheless found the hopelessness of Ms. Lloyd’s world view ultimately to be both haunting and very unsettling.

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EVE’S SONG
Off-Broadway, Play
The Public Theater
1 hour, 30 minutes (without an intermission)
Closed

Categories: Off-Broadway, Theater

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