With Lost on the Natchez Trace, talented playwright Jan Buttram* has created a richly textured encounter epitomizing the immorality and searing particulars of (American) slavery on a human scale. There’s no pedantry here, no pontificating. This bold entertainment illuminates. It sends us into the night reflecting on modern examples of justifying self preservation, biblical (not religious) responsibility, and the question of good and evil.
It’s 1825. Slave auctioneer Malcom Jeters (Peter Brouwer) has lost his mule, his possessions and his way during a severe storm. He’s wounded, dehydrated and starving. Tom (Leopold Lowe), a runaway slave, extricates Jeters from the tree to which he’s bound himself during an accompanying flood. Historical hierarchy is immediately established when, despite the most dire circumstances, Jeters calls Tom “boy” commanding that the slave carry him to safety. Jeters has no idea with whom he’s dealing.
“Moses got lost in the woods 40 days and 40 nights…” Tom says raising a verbal eyebrow, “You’re the man sold me off the auction block. (for $1000) You and me need to bargain.” “I don’t bargain with a nigger,” snaps Jeters. But of course he does. Stubborn, righteous, and, it turns out, frightened (curiously we see no sign of this), Jeters protests he was not the auctioneer in question, defending his corroded soul while upping the offers. Tom wants to know the location of his wife and baby who were dispensed with separately.
Lost on the Natchez Trace is a gothic dance—either with the devil or redemption depending on your point of view. Both men’s stories come out gradually, one ominously related, one convulsively wrenched, with parts viscerally reenacted. Nothing, neither the facts, the choices, nor the reality the audience thinks it’s observing, is as it seems.
The play is masterfully structured and filled with crosscurrents, surprising us to the very end. On several occasions its convincingly detailed protagonists talk on top of each another evoking raw jazz. Their relationship is emotionally resonant and unflinching.
Leopold Lowe (Tom) is a find! He moves like something primal, sings (beautifully and easily), erupts from the guts, and sustains focus at every level. A compellingly watchable actor, Lowe conveys dignity, ferocity, despair and unfathomable patience with intrinsic credibility. His timing is superb.
Peter Brouwer (Malcom Jeters) who first suggested the piece to Buttram, is less persuasive. Though he comes rigorously alive (as does Jeters) remembering the auction, Brouwer’s energy seems otherwise uneven. We never fully believe either Jeters’s born to the bone arrogance or his eventual desperation. Nor does his wretchedly failing body reflect appropriate pain. Positive exceptions include Jeters’s talking about his family which is disturbingly conversational and those moments the character realizes he’s actually not winning.
Director Kate Bushmann uses the imaginative set and intimate stage space with great, never less than organic, variety. Tom’s movement among the trees and vines of the swamp is hypnotic. His shifts from seeming acquiescence to predatory baiting are seamless. Jeters’s naturalistic delivery shows an ordinary man trapped in extraordinary times, intensifying the truth of the story. Pacing is first rate.
I have two qualms, both based on choices with which I disagree. First, manifestations of Jeters’s physical decline disappear when he plays auctioneer. Though speech might grow unnaturally strong in the throes of reenactment, a lack of grounding infirmity and pain takes us away from a reality which needs to be omnipresent. Secondly, there are a few too many speeches delivered from behind trees.
Note: This incredibly forceful piece is helmed by two women, writer, Jan Buttram and director, Kate Bushmann.
Andrew Lu’s Set Design is inspired. His configuration of an overgrown swamp out of massive coils of rope serves the play beautifully in both the literal and metaphoric sense. It’s also aesthetically marvelous.
Sidney Levitt and Catherine Siracusa’s Costumes are exactly as they should be. Travis McHale’s Lighting Design is fittingly stormy and spooky. The latter actually seems to warm the stage-eerier in context. David Margolin Lawson’s Sound Design is pitch perfect (no pun intended.) We know just where the storm and river are as well as what they’re “intending.”
*Jan Buttram is also Artistic Director of The Abingdon Theatre
The Natchez Trace is a historical path that extends roughly 440 miles from Natchez, Mississippi to Nashville, Tennessee, linking the Cumberland, Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers.
Photos by Kim T. Sharpe
Lost on the Natchez Trace by Jan Buttram
Directed by Kate Bushmann
With Peter Brouwer and Leopold Lowe
Abingdon Theatre’s Dorothy Strelsin Theatre
312 West 36 Street
Through February 26, 2012
212-868-2055
