"Feeding Beatrice" is a Gothic Tale of Trauma and Racism
It was a dark and stormy night on Friday, November 4th when Forward Theater Company opened their fall production, Feeding Beatrice: A Gothic Tale in the Playhouse at Overture Center. Part mystery, part horror story and part social commentary, the play didn’t need the raging thunderstorms outside to evoke a creepy, something’s-not-quite-right vibe. There is a sense of unease from the start, that eventually climaxes in disturbing reveals of two interrelated stories about trauma – one very disturbing family saga of physical and psychological abuse, and one more subtle, suffocating plotline of racist aggressions that is no less painful and no less damaging. Directed by Forward Theater’s Artistic Director Jennifer Uphoff Gray, the ambitious production continues through November 20.
The play begins with a happy young Black couple “christening” the bathroom in the house they’ve just purchased; a historic home in what June (Candace Thomas) describes as a good neighborhood with good schools – a place they deserve to live because they are good people. While her husband Lurie (Jamal James) is worried about the pricetag of their purchase, and the list of costly improvements and upgrades in décor that June has in mind, he seems happy to give his wife something she’s longed for after many years of scrimping and saving – the perfect house to start a family. But like the house itself, something seems a bit off as the pair discuss, convince, and reassure each other that this piece of property was the element missing from their lives – the one thing they needed to be happy.
Photo by Ross Zentner
So what dark secret is the house hiding? The titular character Beatrice, the ghost of a troubled teenage girl who died in the 1950s. After disturbing her grave, the new owners of the house are cursed with her presence, which then evolves from antagonistic attitudes to loaded threats, incessant demands for attention and subservience (and lots of milk and jam), and her perverse desire to manipulate them, even to “own” them.
As the ponytailed girl wearing retro pedal pushers, Alexander Salter is a consistently menacing spectre from 1950s white suburban America, that doesn’t really want a “negro” family living in her neighborhood. Salter is completely convincing as a pouty girl feigning innocence, but with a sinister persona just under the surface. Her sing-song demands of June and Lurie walk the line between childlike and maniacal. As we learn more about her harrowing family life, it’s easy to see how her trauma has manifested in a revenge fantasy, but moments of sympathy for the abuse she suffered are far outweighed by the pain she is determined to inflict on the house’s new owners.
Photo by Ross Zentner
Jamal James has the only moments of levity in the play as the often baffled Lurie – a man who wants to appease both his wife and the ghost. A proxy for the audience, James is the one with logical reactions to bizarre situations and he makes the most of those lines. He adopts a “get along, go along” attitude so that the couple can survive their current peril and move on to the “American dream” of home ownership and raising kids in a safe, nice neighborhood where his children will have more opportunities than he had. His fear of being summoned to the bathroom where Beatrice is bathing is palpable – for centuries Black men have been lynched over accusations of improprieties with white women and – ghost or not – the teen seems intent on luring Lurie into a situation that could threaten his marriage, if not his life. When he gives in to Beatrice’s racist fantasies he sees it as a means to an end, while his wife June labels it “step and fetch” behavior, which she abhors.
Candace Thomas’s June is the biggest enigma in the play. Her attachment to the house as the answer to all the couple’s problems seems exaggerated, her desperation to keep the house’s secrets hidden seems perverse, and her relationships with both Beatrice and Lurie change significantly scene to scene. Her final moment in the story is as shocking as it is baffling.
As an intentionally provocative piece, Feeding Beatrice shows its hand from the very start, with goofy-sounding Halloween songs playing in the background as everyone finds their seats before the show. It’s only when you listen carefully to the lyrics that you realize the cheezy, 1950s song performed by Louis Armstrong is called “Spooks” – a benign reference to ghosts at the time, and an ugly, derogatory word for Black people in subsequent decades. Smart and effective composition and sound design by Joe Cerqua haunts the show, including a lot of floorboards creaking and pipes moaning. We realize quickly that it’s not the sounds of the old house settling, it’s the sound of a girl gasping for breath. A progressively more distorted music box melody is also eerily effective as the play draws to a close.
Similarly, Noelle Stollmack’s spare set shows us good bones from a classic, century-old house, including doorframes with carved wooden rosettes and decorative mouldings, a prominent clawfoot bathtub, and a serviceable kitchen. But it also shows a mass of pipes and wires in a mysterious, dark space underneath an upper floor bathroom, revealing right away that there is something deeply worrying, right underneath the surface. And to emphasize the era when this home was designed, there is a somewhat overbearing plat map projected in the background with parts of some subdivisions covered by wooden planks that make up the house’s back wall. It’s a literal shadow of redlining, looming over the newly integrated neighborhood.
Unfortunately, in spite of all the spookiness baked in to the play, somehow Feeding Beatrice doesn’t hold us on the edge of our seats. At 95 minutes, the long first act feels even longer because it’s bogged down with repetitive exposition and many of the choppy opening scenes are separated by significant pauses in blackout. Also, when the ghostly girl first appears onstage, she seems more like a kid playing hide-and-seek than a spirit looking to terrify or harm the Walkers, so the conflict takes a very long time to build. While the danger is ramped up to horror levels at the end of the first act, that feeling of imminent threat isn’t sustained; it comes and goes. Beatrice’s stories of her miserable childhood also confuse the audiences’s sympathies, and undercut the Horror Noire that focuses on race as the target for perhaps gruesome ends. Hopefully the play, with all its twists and turns, will generate good post-show conversations about the historical (and continuing) institutional racism with deadly consequences in this country, which is ultimately much more frightening than this “gothic” tale.