‘The America Play’ keeps audience thinking

Propped up on a wooden rocking chair, an Abraham Lincoln look-alike strategically places a faux beard on his face and shares the story of his journey from gravedigger to Lincoln impersonator.

“The America Play,” written by Suzan-Lori Parks and directed by Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe, opened to a nearly full house March 27 at the Wells-Metz Theatre.

The entire first act is centered around lead character the Foundling Father, played by Jamaal McCray. Speaking to the audience, he bares all, telling his tale of how he came to start a business mimicking the assassination of one of America’s finest presidents.

For only a penny, passers-by walk up to a platform, select a gun from an array of options and aim at the Foundling Father. He laughs, rocking back and forth in his chair as if he is in the audience of “Our American Cousin,” the play Lincoln attended the day he was shot. The participant shoots, and the Foundling Father topples over “dead.”

“The South is avenged!” one man shouts, running off the platform and landing center stage. After his outburst, he meekly thanks the “dead Lincoln” and walks offstage.  

Throughout the performance, patrons interrupt the Foundling Father as he tells his story, but some characters surprised the audience.

One jumps off of the stage and, in a ninja-style tumble, lands center stage and shouts a Japanese phrase, earning laughs from the audience. He also criticizes the Foundling Father for wearing a blonde beard.

The beard comes from the Foundling Father’s prized beard box, with initials “A.L.” printed in gold on the top.

“Some inconsistencies are good,” the Foundling Father says.

He takes a moment to point out his stovepipe hat.

“They aren’t usually worn indoors,” he said, “But people don’t like their Lincoln without a hat.”

The Foundling Father’s son Brazil and his wife Lucy, played by IU graduate students Shewaan Howard and Dawn Thomas, respectively, carry the second act.

The audience discovers that the Foundling Father is dead and finds Brazil digging a hole, a rectangular cutout in the middle of the stage. By digging up his father’s old possessions, Brazil searches to find a deeper connection with the man who left his family to pursue a new business when Brazil was only five years old.

Brazil is a thirty-year-old man who still acts very much like a child. At times he is rolling on the stage or crawling into the hole with one leg extended in the air.

Lucy tells him stories about when his father visited an amusement park called The Great Hole, where look-alike historical figures such as Mistopher Columbus paraded for crowds.

The Foundling Father’s admiration for the parade led him to move to the west coast in pursuit of starting his own impersonation business.  

In the final scene, the dead Foundling Father interacts with his family and asks them for hugs. Both Lucy and Brazil reject his request, not ready to forgive him for abandoning them. Finally they put him to rest in a wooden casket, big enough to fit his hat.

In general, the audience members were left both enamored and perplexed by the performance, showing their appreciation with a round of applause.

“The first thing that comes to mind by the end is you’re puzzled,” Bloomington resident Frank Buczolich said. “I don’t know that there is a clear or easy way to describe the play itself. The actors, it’s another matter entirely. You could be ... enthralled by their performances.”

Audience members noted the inspiring performances of the cast, particularly McCray’s.

“It’s very impressive, anybody that can learn an hour-long monologue and pull it off that way,” Maryland native Alin Tilles said.

Despite the play’s complexities, the audience members found importance in it.

“It’s stuff like this that still promotes and invokes thought,” said IU Senior Associate Director for Admissions Bryan Bradford. “I think it conjures up thoughts that you probably haven’t considered in a while. And it does it in a different way than what a book would do or what a novel would do or any kind of written work would do.”