Aesthetically, Samm-Art Williams’s Home belongs to a radical tradition. Like a lot of other works that have emerged from New York’s experimental scene, the 1979 play, running now at Court Theatre, uses stripped-down storytelling techniques to achieve a populist immediacy. It requires little in the way of set or props and only three actors. Williams says he made the logistics simple enough that a cast could perform it in the streets.
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Yet despite its Brecht-influenced style, Home‘s message is strictly conservative. Its hero, Cephus—a poor, good-hearted black farmer from fictional Cross Roads, North Carolina—may be American society’s sacrificial lamb, going to jail, losing his land, and becoming a drunk in “a very, very large American city” where he sleeps in his own vomit and urine on a subway men’s room floor. But his sole means to salvation lies in a return to the “traditional values” of home, family, and property rights. By the time Williams shoehorns his protagonist into an implausibly happy ending, the injustice that makes the Cephuses of the world vulnerable to poverty, intolerance, and despair has been rendered moot by the fact that this one Cephus can shut himself up in his house with a good woman who’ll bake him pecan pies.
Then things suddenly turn grim. It’s 1966 and the Vietnam war is in full swing; Cephus gets drafted but refuses to serve, citing the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” It’s a stance he says he learned from his grandfather and his Uncle Lewis, whose teachings supposedly guide him through life. But Williams supplies hardly any impression of either man—both die offstage early in the play—and does little to dramatize their impact on Cephus. And considering Cephus’s history of guilt-free fornication, the religious zeal for which he serves a five-year sentence comes across as nothing more than a narrative expedient.
