Sacred and profane
A pair of plays examine going home, racism, and the ties that bind.

By Robert Avila

THOMAS JEFFERSON DREAMED of a republic of freeholders in which liberty and democratic institutions could rest secure because all voters would have an equal stake in society. But the author of the Declaration of Independence never imagined "all men" meant African Americans (let alone women of any background). The fact is that reality is colored by all kinds of dreams, which leads to unpredictable variations on the original theme. Two very different and worthwhile plays dealing with race in America bring the point, as it were, home.

The all-American contradiction offered by the black freeholder on the Jeffersonian model animates American Conservatory Theater's world premiere of S.M. Shephard-Massat's striking new play about a romance between an African American farmer and the sister of his deceased wife in 1920s Georgia. With three wonderfully detailed performances directed by Israel Hicks, Levee James moves adroitly through several dramatic keys in the course of its two acts. It starts, deceptively enough, in a simple pious tone of homecoming as Lil (Rosalyn Coleman) arrives at the house of brother-in-law Wes (Steven Anthony Jones) and his two daughters (unseen), after having worked as a maid in Atlanta. As they begin to unwind, the high note of Christian decorousness gets spiked (like the "good ol' spring water" they ostentatiously enjoy) with a sharp and worldly humor, brought to perfection by the addition into the proceedings of old friend, and town fop, Fitzhugh (Gregory Wallace).

But for all the humor, home is still, as Lil says, as "sacred" as you can get. Her return, which brings with it dark memories, unfolds against the menacing backdrop of Jim Crow and white supremacy – a system of legal and extralegal oppression highlighted by the mass exodus then underway and known to history as the Great Migration, in which thousands of African Americans fled northward from a racial caste system enforced by publicly sanctioned terror (most notoriously in the form of lynching). It's a context that gives the lie to the romantic facade of racial harmony and a gallant South put forward by iconic works like Gone with the Wind (the cinematic version of which almost seems intentionally invoked, with cutting irony, in the brilliant cloud-strewn sky framing Loy Arcenas's sumptuous set design, especially as the silhouetted figure of a dead tree stands against it between scenes).

While Lil has no illusions about salvation in the North's crowded cities (with their "riots and whatnot" and "people carrying influenza and polio"), her desire to see Wes give up his farm to the predatory whites she fears will otherwise kill him injects an irrevocable tension that only increases as they kindle a relationship. Unfolding with an admirable economy, in dialogue as rich in poetry as it is in wit and an easy naturalism, Levee James climaxes in a potent, tension-filled register reminiscent of the embattled last stand of the outsider family in Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. The principal difference here, of course, is that Lil and Wes are as insider as you can get, and their dispossession remains all the more powerful for being rooted in the bitter facts of history.

Cajun country

Fast-forward 80 years to 2003 and the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase (Jefferson again), and dispossession becomes a repossession of sorts, at least in the racial dynamic running through Anne Galjour's Cajun comedy, Okra: A Dark Comedy. In the first multicharacter play by the San Francisco-based monologuist, director David Dower's exceptional cast lays out in quasi-sitcom fashion the story of Franco-American mother Lillian Bourgeois (Frances Lee McCain) and her two daughters (Jeri Lynn Cohen and Anne Darragh) on the Louisiana bayou, as they prepare to welcome a French cousin (Ron Campbell) they have never met.

The dysfunctional dynamic among the barely functioning Bourgeois women – aggravated by the struggle of Claudine (Darragh) with her mother over her late father's patrimony – gets pushed to the breaking point after Lillian moves to stop the budding romance of her daughter Marie (Cohen) with Antoine (Joseph K. McDowell), lifelong neighbor and the former employee-now owner of Mr. Bourgeois's fishing business. Antoine's African American roots preclude his eating at Lillian's Franco-centric table, even though her much vaunted Cajun cuisine (a wonderfully rich surrogate here for everything from romance to the social history it helps make) owes its special qualities as much to an African inheritance as a European one.

That Southern legacy, in other words, is a complicated affair, indeed a family affair, and not only in Galjour's darkly funny and heartfelt comedy either. Her clever refusal to give in to a neat resolution says as much. Families, like the legacy of race in America, tend to resist happy endings, even in comedies. Then again, it's in comedy that we can best shoulder the burden of struggling on without them.

'Levee James' runs through Sun/14. Wed/10-Sat/13, 8 p.m. (also Wed/10 and Sat/13, 2 p.m.); Sun/14, 2 p.m., Geary Theater, 415 Geary, S.F. $11-$68. (415) 749-2228, www.act-sf.org. 'Okra: A Dark Comedy' runs through Sun/14. Wed/10-Sat/13, 8 p.m.; Sun/14, 3 p.m., Brava Theater Center, 2789 24th St., S.F. $18-$28. (415) 647-2822, www.brava.org.