Wake-Up Call

THEATER REVIEW: Blue Door

by Mark Cofta

Tanya Barfield's Blue Door — in the Arden Theatre Co.'s smart, engaging production — postulates that our past (and, particularly, the denial of it) influences who we are today.

Philosophy of mathematics professor Lewis, played with frenetic passion by Johnnie Hobbs Jr., can't sleep because his wife has left him. His tossing and turning in their bed, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling books on Daniel Conway's dreamlike abstract set, is interrupted by storyteller Kes Khemnu, who shares Lewis' three previous generations' harrowing survival tales.

Lewis' identity crisis centers on his relationship with whites and whiteness: Does his success in academia make him not black enough? (Blue Door predates Barack Obama's ascendancy and the debate about his blackness.) Lewis' white wife left because he refused to attend the 1995 Million Man March or otherwise embrace his black identity.

So Khemnu, acknowledging that the drama playing in this theater also unfolds in Lewis' imagination, explores Lewis' black American heritage. Great-grandfather Simon, born a slave, deals with the auctioning of his mother, and son Jesse's birth. Khemnu also becomes Jesse, coping with the violence of Southern prejudice, and Lewis' brother Rex, who succumbed to drugs presumably because of the same horrible memory that haunted their father, Charles, causing him to abuse both boys.

This brisk tour through Simon's lineage — the play whips by in 75 minutes — proves fascinating, the ugliness of prejudice and ignorance balanced by the dynamism, genuineness and humor of both actors' performances. Blue Door sweeps us along so well, in fact, that we don't wonder until later what it all means.

Simon's mother urged him to paint their slave shack door blue to keep ghosts out and good spirits in. But which is which? Ancestors force Lewis to confront the ugliest events of his past, but to what end? Lewis hasn't denied his blackness — his darkly funny recollections of university parties reveal his racial hyper-awareness — or forgotten his history. Presumably, his Scrooge-like sleepless night leads to greater resolve through appreciating his ancestors' perseverance, but we don't really glean what this will mean in Lewis' waking life. Some glimpse of the day to come would justify this extraordinary journey.

Through March 21, $29-$48, Arden Theatre Co., 40 N. Second St., 215-922-1122, ardentheatre.org.