GREAT MIGRATIONS

"Home" and "What Became of Us."

- VINSON CUNNINGHAM

To appreciate “Home,” Samm-Art Williams’s celebrated play from 1979, is, in part, to be drawn back in time, to the heyday of the Negro Ensemble Company, headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1967, it was a crucial hotbed for Black writing, acting, and directing talent, helping to produce names like Phylicia Rashad, Samuel L. Jackson, Esther Rolle, and Denzel Washington. Williams—who died in May, mere days before “Home” ’s revival on Broadway, at Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theatre, under Kenny Leon’s direction—was a mainstay of the company.

Williams was a big man—six-six and around three hundred pounds, according to his friends—funny and kind. Like Cephus (Tory Kittles), the blithe, antic, tricksterish protagonist of “Home,” he was from a small town in North Carolina, called Burgaw. Cephus’s is called Cross Roads. Williams got the idea for the play on a Greyhound bus headed to the South from his new home, New York. Like many Black plays of the era, “Home” issues forth from the twin themes of migration and political alienation. Cephus is a down-home guy, a farmer deeply connected to the country soil. He’s in love with Pattie Mae (Brittany Inge), the sweetheart of his youth, who goes off to college and gets too full of book learning to feel comfortable returning to Cross Roads. Cephus’s long-held hope to marry her is dashed.

Soon, Cephus ducks the Vietnam draft and does time in prison, then reluctantly skips town and heads north, to the coldhearted streets of New York. The speech in “Home” resembles a cycle of lyric poems voiced by high-minded, plain-living folk. Inge and Stori Ayers play a host of characters, sometimes a confirming chorus and sometimes a panoply of tempters and sidekicks, giving Cephus’s journey shades of an epic allegory. The dialogue is full of effusions such as this one, from Cephus: