Tobacco Road American Blues Theater
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All the same, a lot of people chose to dismiss Mr. Caldwell’s grossness in that very way, including Chicago mayor Edward Kelly, who called Tobacco Road “a mass of outrageous obscenity” and banned it from being performed in the city. (Enterprising producers tried presenting it on a showboat—the Dixiana, based in Michigan City—but threw in the towel after the Dixiana sank, got rammed by an out-of-control naval reserve vessel, and then sank again for reasons unrelated to the ramming.)
Now you’ve got to squint some to see what all the fuss was about. Kirkland’s script, currently being staged by American Blues Theater, is indeed a mass of obscenity—practically everybody in it behaves shockingly. But the most offensive thing about it at this point isn’t what Atkinson called grossness. It’s what he called truth—specifically, the play’s depiction of “the complete degeneracy of the Georgia cracker.”
Director Cecilie Keenan hasn’t got the answer. Where Kirkland suggested a tone of “grim humor,” much of Keenan’s revival alternates between easy laughs—making a piece of business, for instance, out of Jeeter and Ada trying to remember their kids’ names—and a naturalism that sinks over and over again into inadvertent comedy. Lacking a strategy for neutralizing cracker stereotypes, the production gets overrun by them. The mere sight of Dennis Cockrum’s Jeeter pulling his battered hat down over his eyes for a snooze on the porch comes across as an ugly ethnic joke, and the possibility of empathy disappears.
