In the Blood
Opening Night: September 17, 2017
Closing: October 15, 2017
Theater: Signature Theatre
In the Blood’s Hester La Negrita is a penniless mother of five condemned by the men who love her, in this play hailed by The New York Times as “…a work of art. You will leave thrilled, even comforted by its mastery.” Hester turns to former lovers, friends, and the institutions meant to support her, only to be spurned by them all with devastating consequences, in this new production directed by Obie Award-winner Sarah Benson (An Octoroon). This play is being produced in tandem with Suzan-Lori Parks’ _______ A, directed by Jo Bonney, as part of the event we are calling The Red Letter Plays, a unique opportunity to see two plays by one writer in dialogue with each other.
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September 17, 2017
Tragedy stalks Hester La Negrita, the heroine of Suzan-Lori Parks’s “In the Blood,” as relentlessly as it does the doomed queens of Euripides and Racine. Played with exquisitely clouded radiance by Saycon Sengbloh in the Signature Theater’s first-rate revival of this genre-mutating 1999 drama, the illiterate Hester would probably never presume to talk in such highfalutin terms.
Though she tries her hardest to live as if were otherwise, Hester intuits that destiny will be ruthless with her. How could it not be with this impoverished mother of five, spurned not just by lovers past but also by the world whose margins she inhabits so tenuously?
On one sunny day in the dirty city, Hester sees a full solar eclipse that is visible to no one else. It was, she says, like “the hand of fate with its five fingers coming down on me.” Ms. Sengbloh endows the description with a raptness that stops time, and an abject figure acquires majesty.
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