Foreground, left to right, Rais Clarke-Mendes as Maude Lynn Albans, Ryann Myers as Odette Albans and Deborah Castrilli as Agnès Albans, and background, left to right, Sophia Walker as Makeda and Nehassaiu Degannes as La Veuve in The House That Will Not Stand.David Cooper/Shaw Festival
- Title: The House That Will Not Stand
- Written by: Marcus Gardley
- Director: Philip Akin
- Actors: Monica Parks, Sophia Walker
- Company: The Shaw Festival
- Venue: Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre
- City: Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.
- Year: Runs to Oct. 12, 2024
The House That Will Not Stand, a 2014 play from the United States that now has its Canadian premiere at the Shaw Festival, is set in New Orleans in a fascinating period in the great North American city’s history.
It’s post-Louisiana Purchase, but the American Civil War is still decades away. This is a time when things are getting worse for Black people and people of colour as the relatively less oppressive colonial French customs and systems are starting to be replaced by antebellum American ones.
But, at the moment playwright Marcus Gardley has chosen to depict here, there are still property-owning (and, indeed, slave-owning) free women of colour, quadroon balls and plaçage – a kind of civil union that existed in French and Spanish colonies between white men and racialized women. (Women who entered into such relationships were not considered wives but placées – and the men sometimes had a white wife as well.)
At the start of The House That Will Not Stand, Beartrice Albans (Monica Parks), a well-off free woman of colour, is undergoing a personal change in circumstances after the death of Lazare, the father of her children to whom she was a placée.
While other women like her are moving to France in fear of losing their rights and freedoms, it’s unclear to Beartrice whether things are about to get better or worse in New Orleans for her and her three daughters: Agnès (Deborah Castrilli), Maude Lynn (Rais Clarke-Mendes), Odette (Ryann Myers). The oldest and youngest yearn to become placées themselves, a fate their mother has so far protected them from; the middle one is more religiously minded.
Also living in the Albans’ Creole cottage – the title of which should transfer to Beartrice under the old laws – are the enslaved woman Makeda (Sophia Walker), who has long been promised her freedom when the conditions are right, and Beartrice’s crazy (or perhaps not so crazy) sister Marie Josephine (Cheryl Mullings).
Rounding out the cast of characters is La Veuve (Nehassaiu deGannes), another free woman of colour who bears a long-time grudge against Beartrice – and tells stories of her propensity for knocking off lovers that are worth taking with a grain of salt (or are they?).
La Veuve is another free woman of colour who bears a long-time grudge against Beartrice.David Cooper/Shaw Festival
The House That Will Not Stand’s title is a reference to Federico García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba – of which Gardley’s play is an adaptation – and the biblical verse that Abraham Lincoln would borrow for his famous speech about how the different regions of the United States could not continue to follow different paths regarding slavery.
Beartrice’s own house is, like the country it has become a part of, divided against itself. Its female characters all yearn for freedom – but disagree on what constitutes it. What one daughter sees as an escape from her stifling home life – becoming a placée – her mother sees as a kind of prison sentence.
“This world got all kinds of chains,” Marie Josephine says. “Be one thing when somebody is born in chains, be another when you get chains put on you. But the saddest in all the world is when you put them chains on yourself.”
That sense of being constricted is not entirely successfully conjured in a production staged in the round by director Philip Akin; Sean Mulcahy’s set, comprised of chairs of round tables, feels cluttered rather than confining. (I wasn’t entirely sold on some of his costume choices, either.)
While I liked the way Akin had the scenes and settings blur together, I didn’t necessarily think it was the most perfect union of staging and material.
Though Gardley’s script can be a bit blurry in style at times; it is not just indebted to Lorca, but to the plays of August Wilson, with a little Tennessee Williams for good measure.
The actors assembled for this production excel in different sections of the play. DeGannes is best at conveying the wicked humour in the script’s first act, while Walker galvanizes the second with a hair-raising scene that sees her use voodoo to channel the dead.
The House That Will Not Stand has its impressive moments – but it is ultimately one of those adaptations you leave wondering what might have materialized had the playwright been free from the chains of source material to pursue an entirely original dramatic path.