Review: Ancestry, Identity Collide in BLUE DOOR, at Profile Theatre

Are we the products of our cultural history? Or can we create ourselves from scratch as something new?

These are the questions Lewis, an African-American mathematician, struggles with in Tanya Barfield's BLUE DOOR, now playing at Profile Theatre. Lewis is, by external measures, successful -- married, a math professor with a new book out. But then one night, his wife, who's white, decides to leave him after 25 years, ostensibly because he refuses to participate in the Million Man March -- and also because of housework. Lewis's wife believes that he has cut himself off from his history and that, by doing this, he has also cut himself off from himself.

In the play, over the course of a sleepless night, the ghosts of his ancestors come barreling down on him, four generations of them, from his great-grandfather, who was a slave on a southern plantation, to his brother, who died of a drug overdose. Lewis is forced to finally reckon with his past and with his place not just as a person living here and now today, but as an inheritor of a history in which his ancestors were persecuted, and sometimes killed, because of their race.

BLUE DOOR asks us to consider whether we're obligated to our cultural past and whether we can be whole people without acknowledging the generations that came before.

The shining star of Profile's production is Seth Rue, who plays all of the ancestors (some at different ages) and a few other characters as well. He moves among them deftly, while also developing them so completely that they all become real, human people -- falling in love, experiencing violence and loss, and painting doors blue to keep evil spirits away. Mr. Rue is responsible for bringing most of the humanity and the emotional charge to this production, and he does it incredibly well.

Victor Mack's performance as Lewis isn't quite as mesmerizing. This could be because of the part itself. The incident that sets off his night of insomnia -- his wife leaving -- is difficult to connect with his internal conflict. At one point, his wife tells him she has been contemplating leaving him for 9 or 10 years. So, obviously, it's not really about the Million Man March. It's probably about the housework. It's equally difficult to connect the dots in some other parts of Lewis's story. Maybe this is intentional, because the idea is that Lewis himself is fragmented because of his lack of connection with his family's past. But the result is that at times his story is hard to bond with.

Mr. Mack is at his best when he's talking about the mathematical equivalent of his personal dilemma -- whether this moment in time is a collection of the moments that came before or a new thing unto itself. It's a good question, and one that you'll still be mulling over long after you leave the theatre.

BLUE DOOR runs through April 24. Tickets and info here: http://profiletheatre.org/2016/blue-door/

Photo credit: David Kinder

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