Troy/Albany

Suzan-Lori Parks’ Scarlet Update Draws Blood

by RS Benedict | Mar 21, 2024 11:40 am

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Posted to: Theater

In the Blood
Saint Rose Theater
Albany N.Y.
March 15, 2024

Suzan-Lori Parks’ In the Blood, a gritty urban remix of The Scarlet Letter, presents the struggles of a single mother named Hester, and uses her story to examine the moralism and hypocrisy of American society. Capital Region’s Harbinger Theater company chose the play as a swan song for the Saint Rose Theater, whose future looks dim with Saint Rose College’s impending closure at the end of the academic year.

It’s a heartrending farewell, and not just because of the death of the college. In the Blood, though tinged with sharp humor, is a dark, unflinching drama that is not afraid to make the audience uncomfortable. It goes places, and many of those places aren’t easy to look at.

In Hawthorne’s novel, Hester Prynne’s sin was lust; she cheated on her husband with a local clergyman. In the Blood​’s Hester La Negrita also chases forbidden love, but here the relationship that puts her at odds with society isn’t a clandestine affair with a man, but rather her maternal devotion to her fatherless children — children society thinks she wasn’t supposed to have, or keep, or adore.

And our modern Hester’s great sin isn’t sex; we’re past those Puritan hangups. No, her sin is being poor and staying poor rather than pulling herself up by her own bootstraps.

As Hester La Negrita tries, in vain, to support her kids, she is visited by five characters who dispense contradictory, often cruel advice on how to improve herself. There’s the condescending social worker who encourages Hester to dump some of her kids in foster care and get to work as a one-woman sweatshop, a substance abusing streetwalker who tells Hester to make pornography or pimp out her 13 year old special needs son, a recently-sober ex-boyfriend who offers Hester domestic stability as long as she utterly submits to his will, a creepy doctor who badgers Hester to sterilize herself (using the dehumanizing term ​“spay”), and a self-righteous preacher who talks about helping the poor but refuses to offer child support to the baby he fathered with Hester. 

The actors playing these supporting roles also did double-duty as Hester’s children. Some of them approached their characters with gleeful exaggeration: Aaliyah Al-Fuhaid writhed and twerked as Amiga, and Dalton Russell’s creepy roadside doctor could easily appear in a campy Stuart Gordon flick. But Zach Kaiser’s performance as Hester’s first boyfriend Chilly stood out for its naturalism; with his soft-spoken delivery, Chilly came across as frightfully real, his demands for control so dangerous because they sound almost reasonable. Almost.

Each of these five characters sexually exploits Hester; each character talks at Hester, not to her, constantly putting her on the defensive. It’s a tough role to play; leading lady Nicole DamaPoleto walked a delicate line having to portray a character rendered helpless by societal circumstances without frustrating the audience with her passivity. It helps that the script is suffused with acidic wit. (At one point, Hester tosses her junkie friend a bit of sewing and quips, ​“You’re good with needles. Thread this.”)

In the Blood revisits a classic American story about sin and society to ask if we’ve really changed all that much since the 1600s. It concludes, grimly, that we’ve gotten worse.

In the Blood will play until March 24 at the Saint Rose Theater. 

Where I’m going next: I’ll be attending the Albany Film Festival on April 6.