Playwright: book, music and lyrics by Mari Evans, adapted from the novel by Zora Neale Hurston
At: ETA Arts Foundation at ETA Square, 7558 S. South Chicago Ave.
Phone: (773) 752-3955; $25
Runs through: Nov. 7
Even without the addition of songs and dances, there's enough plot for a half-dozen plays in Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 saga of Janie Crawford, a poor but beautiful woman in search of adventure, romance and a richer life than her humble origins offer—a premise fueling popular fiction for two centuries (e.g. Vanity Fair, Far From The Madding Crowd).
Our country-bred heroine is first married off to an old, but well-off, farmer. Later she elopes with an ambitious entrepreneur—also older, but whose goals hint at upward mobility. His success leaves her, upon his death, a widow with the wherewithal to scandalize her neighbors by marrying a handsome laborer 15 years her junior. But in every instance, lovers' promises sour before literary convenience frees the irrepressible Janie to embark on another odyssey.
But Eyes is not just chick-lit soap (albeit finely milled). Janie's marital progress is framed in vivid pictures of Negro life in the Everglades region during the pivotal years just following the civil war. These include glimpses of rural and migrant society, and—most fascinating—a colony founded by former slaves bent on economic independence, their experiment evolving into the town where Janie's second husband serves as mayor and chief source of revenue.
But adapter Mari Evans has chosen to overload her already-full plate with a musical score that, while capably crafted—sometimes brilliantly so, as with Geri Williams' Hurricane dance—decorates, rather than propels, the action. The result is a show not yet a finished play, so much as a mid-development draft for one: its leisurely early moments impose excessive abbreviation on its later, more dramatic, ones, much as its surplus of musical disruptions force its more savory songs—the inspirational 'Land', for example, or the sassy 'A Woman By Herself'—to move too quickly from introduction to conclusion.
But, as Janie's grandmother might say, a cook must first assemble all her ingredients before anything can come out of the oven. For all the current production's disappointments, within it are the makings of an eloquent and entertaining pageant of a hitherto-ignored chapter in American history.
