Looking at The Playhouse stage for The Madison Repertory Theatre's production of ""Home,"" one would think that the play is about carpenters or lumberjacks. The setting is a farm home in Crossroads, N.C. and, like a ship, everything is made with large planks of wood. A ship is a good allusion for this play, which centers around Cephus Miles (Patrick Sims), a man who spends a good chunk of his life in transit. Luckily for director Ron OJ Parsons, playwright Samm-Art Williams and the audience, he pauses long enough to tell us about what he is thinking.
The play is a life history of Cephus Miles from early adolescence until well into his adult years. He starts in Crossroads, a small agrarian community where he lives on the 10-odd acres of his uncle's farm telling us his anecdotes about his childhood. Cephus will end up meeting a lot of people in his life, so Woman One (Olivia Dawson) and Woman Two (Tracey Bonner) take on countless numbers of roles, from the childhood sweetheart Pattie Mae Wells (Dawson) to an unsympathetic welfare office clerk (Bonner). They are instrumental in breathing life into Cephus' world, and with the exception of the play's first few minutes—when their words seemed to run together—both actresses do an exemplary job.
One of the major narrative threads for Cephus is his relationship with God, who throughout most of the play is vacationing in Miami. Many of the earlier parts in the play involve Cephus telling us about church and Sunday school, which he attends regularly while distilling moonshine, dancing at fish fries and pursuing the love of Pattie Mae.
Then, in a few brief years, his pastoral life falls apart as Pattie Mae goes off to college and leaves him for another man, and his friends and family disown him when he refuses to fight in the Vietnam War on the non-granted grounds of conscientious objection. After several years in prison, he is released. Finding the farm gone and the people he knew ignoring him, he decides to sojourn north. The promises of the big city are not promises kept for Cephus. The rest of the play is about how he gets home, because it is only at his home where the play can end, and we can have a transformation.
In a play where one character matures roughly 40 years and two actors have to play dozens of roles, the direction becomes very important. Ron OJ Parsons—who was last at the Rep directing ""Topdog/Underdog""—does a superb job, particularly when it comes to pacing and letting the humor in the script come out. Patrick Sims, a faculty member of the university's theater department is strong throughout, as his co-actors start out roughly swallowing their early words, but then quickly rise to Sims' level.
This production was the second in the Madison Repertory Theatre's American Family African-American Artist Series, following last year's ""Having Our Say,"" which told the life stories of two sisters, but played like a book on tape. That is why it is wholly refreshing that the life story of Cephus Miles in ""Home"" appeared to occur right in front of our eyes on a pleasant night in spring.
