Good morning, and welcome to Broadway News’ Broadway Review by Brittani Samuel — our overview of reactions, recommendations and information tied to last night’s Broadway opening of “Home.”
RUNDOWN
The theatrical force that was playwright Samm-Art Williams died in May of this year in Burgaw, North Carolina — the same town where he was born and upon which he drew for his seminal theatrical work, “Home.” Like the show’s central character, Cephus Miles (Tory Kittles), Williams ventured into the “big city” with ambitions for a grander life. Unlike Cephus, though, Williams actually found success in cities like Philadelphia, New York and Hollywood as a theater and television maker, before coming to the same conclusion that Cephus does: There is no urban paradise worthy of quitting the Carolinas. “Home” follows Cephus on a coming-of-age journey beginning in a fictional Southern town called Crossroads, North Carolina. There, Cephus learns to respect the earth beneath him, but struggles to understand the god above him. His journey eventually takes him up north to an unspecified urban zone (New York is the obvious insert), which was pitched to him as a “promised land.” But for a poor, Southern, Black, ex-felon in the 1970s, it is a pit of drugs, opportunists and unemployment. Cephus sloshes around in the city for several years before circumstances allow him to return home.
