AISLE SAY Massachusetts

THE BEST OF ENEMIES

by Mark St. Germain
Directed by Julianne Boyd
featuring Aisha Hinds and John Bedford Lloyd

Barrington Stage Company/Mainstage July 21-August 6

Reviewed by Joel Greenberg

The Best of Enemies, a new play by Mark St. Germain (Freud’s Last Session), is inspired by The Best of Enemies, Race and Redemption in the New South, a work of non-fiction by Osha Gray Davidson. The book details events in Durham, North Carolina in the 1970’s and focuses on Ann Atwater, an African-American, and C.P. Ellis, a man who fought for maintaining White supremacy. Brought together by Bill Reddick, a fledgling social activist who was also an African-American, they forged a relationship that would suggest a movie-of-the-week formula if it weren’t based on historical fact. I can’t speak to the accuracy of the play’s narrative line or to the way that the improbable relationship between these two actually played out, but there is nothing onstage that suggests a writer’s manipulation to force the events into his overarching themes.

Both Atwater and Ellis live in poverty. She is a single mother of two and he is a married father with a severely disabled son. She was a housekeeper before she quit her job and he ran a gas station – his other occupation was as the Grand Cyclops of his local chapter of the KKK, a job he took on with zeal and great public display. As the play opens, Reddick arrives in Durham to organize a townhall meeting to address local education and civil rights. He is entirely aware of the racial strife in the town and, as a way of forcing the sides together, he appoints Atwater and Ellis co-chairs of his committee.

The play is split between public scenes – speeches, public addresses and debate – and private conversations. The latter include the three characters already named plus Ellis’ wife, Mary. The transitions between scenes are handled with projected images of locations in the town and voice-over announcements, the most potent of which are taken from the words of Jess Helms. And though Helms is invoked only a couple of times through the play’s 95 minutes, it is he who I could not stop hearing long after I had left the theatre.

St. Germain certainly knows how to get characters talking to each other. His ear is sharp and his characters are delineated through behaviour and language. He can also find humour in truth and can convey truth through humour without softening his purpose.

In its current state, the play’s conflicts find rather easy solutions. In spite of the earlier scenes in which Atwater and Ellis go at each other and their exchanges reinforce the pain of long-held prejudices, the transformation they experience never surprises us. Even without knowing this story, there was an inevitability of rapprochement not spoken but surely felt. And yet, there is much dialogue to praise highly. The scene in which Ellis describes poverty, the scene in which he demands a platform for his display of the KKK, the scene in which Atwater attacks Reddick’s perceived hypocrisy – these are all gripping conversations.

Aisha Hinds and John Bedford Lloyd, as Atwater and Ellis, balance each other and the play exceptionally well. Lloyd, with his early scenes espousing hate and violence, has the more challenging role. He apologizes for nothing he says or does and so his shift in character draws us to him. Hinds is entirely in the blood and body of Atwater, by turns intimidating and comforting. Clifton Duncan, as Reddick, and Susan Wands, as Mary Ellis, provide powerful support in roles that are sounding boards far more than they are fully realized human beings. The domestic scenes between the Ellises are the play’s least convincing writing and feel as though the playwright is still developing them.

The Best of Enemies is certainly well intentioned and, for the audience, much appreciated. The history to which it refers is still visceral and evokes outrage, as it should. I could take more of the historical record and less of the human interest that St. Germain has crafted, but I am glad to have met Ann Atwater and C.P. Ellis.

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