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    ‘Covenant’ Review: When Inner Turmoil Is Its Own Ghost Story

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    The playwright York Walker makes a promising New York debut at Roundabout Underground.Much is made over whether one is “with God” or not in “Covenant,” a striking new Southern gothic work by York Walker. Following a town’s reaction to a bluesman’s mysterious homecoming in 1930s Georgia, this small, potent Roundabout Underground production sustains a scorching end-of-days tune as much through its electric cast and design elements as by Walker’s script and Tiffany Nichole Greene’s swift direction.Like each of the play’s four women, the 24-year-old Avery (Jade Payton) craves salvation. But she’s not seeking a flight to heaven, like her overbearing Mama (Crystal Dickinson), or from neglect, like her younger sister, Violet (Ashley N. Hildreth). Rather, she desires a certain kind of freedom. Ruthie (Lark White), a lovelorn neighbor grappling with her nascent sexuality, feels the same.A chance at that freedom appears when a childhood friend, Johnny (Chaundre Hall-Broomfield), returns to town after a yearslong absence, touring faraway juke joints. A smooth-talking guitarist, Johnny has dropped his stutter and — rumor has it — picked up prodigious musical skills from a pact with the Devil.Walker nods at the legend of Robert Johnson, the real-life bluesman whose startling technique gave rise to a claim that he had traded his soul for success playing “the Devil’s music.” But, though that mystery informs this play’s effective ghost story, “Covenant” is more interested in unraveling the women’s trust in faith, self and one another to examine how feelings become codified into mythology.The pious Mama thinks she can spot a dark spirit when she sees one and forbids Avery from spending time with Johnny. Seduced by his promise of a life bigger than her repressive own, she doesn’t obey, naturally, and soon comes home one night with bruises and a funny look in her eye. As the locals chatter, gossiping about midnight sightings of Johnny at the graveyard, the play probes each woman’s relationship to fact and fiction.Greene’s suspenseful production indulges in some elegant horror trappings, with characters often plunged in darkness, holding a single match as they share tales of cheating spouses and bad decisions — personal freedoms marked as evil because they stray from cultural dogma.Lawrence Moten’s claustrophobic set turns the audience into the cramped congregation of a Gothic Revival church, the action taking place on either side of its nave and lit by Cha See. Steve Cuiffo’s illusions and Justin Ellington’s sound design, both chilling, lean deep into the story’s supernatural suggestions.But the play’s terror is best conjured by Walker’s dialogue, which weaves rumor into legend and is delivered in gradient shades by an excellent cast. As Avery and Johnny, Payton and Hall-Broomfield play their scenes alluringly straight, and in her forceful turn as Violet, Hildreth believably generates powerful, skeptical chemistry with White’s awe-struck Ruthie.And Dickinson’s sanctimonious Mama comically punctuates each “lord” and “God” with the emphatic righteousness of a “T” sound, and with her beaded eyeglass chain (courtesy of Ari Fulton’s costumes) appears to have tears permanently fixed on her face.The violence of her devotion is made eerily physical in a choreographed prayer sequence (with movement overseen by Stephen Buescher) that shows the carnality often inherent in religion, which can traffic as much in darkness as in the light it claims to seek.If Walker reverse-engineers certain beats a bit too cleanly in order to expose the characters’ hypocrisies, his twists and developments are still satisfying. Working with great economy, Walker’s “Covenant” is an auspicious New York debut for a playwright who clearly has a gift for richly textured work.CovenantThrough Dec. 3 at the Black Box Theater, at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Exception to the Rule,’ Detention Is Sinister

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      Teenagers bond after school in a sort of classroom purgatory. And, where is the teacher?Detention is a drag. For the students in “Exception to the Rule,” it’s also emblematic. Whatever landed them in the after-school slammer, these teenagers were already trapped by forces far beyond their control.They barrel in one after another, their voices ricocheting around the Black Box Theater, where the Roundabout Underground production opened on Wednesday night. In a space no bigger than a classroom, the audience, sitting on three sides, is spitball distance from the bickering, the posturing and revelations of what lies beneath.There’s Mikayla (Amandla Jahava), who balks at her reputation as a bad girl while relishing the attention; the goofball Tommy (Malik Childs), who claims he’s “not tryna holla” at Mikayla while very obviously taking his shot; Abdul (Mister Fitzgerald), who appears guarded and pensive, preferring to keep his head down; Dayrin (Toney Goins), who is quick-tempered but eager for a laugh; and the sweet but tart Dasani (Claudia Logan), whom Dayrin mockingly calls Aquafina (as in the other bottled water brand).Then there’s Erika (MaYaa Boateng), otherwise known as “college-bound Erika,” whose late entrance comes as a shock to the bunch. Upwardly mobile and buttoned-up, she’s what Dayrin calls “the whitest person in a room full of Black people.” What could she have done wrong? And where is the teacher, anyway? They can’t go home until he signs them out.As for the show’s conceit, the playwright, Dave Harris, borrows from both “Waiting for Godot” and John Hughes’s classic portrait of detained and misunderstood youth, “The Breakfast Club.” It’s doubtful that the students’ savior will ever come, and discovering what they’re in for, and what that says about their stations in life, propels the story forward. Throw in a few romantic sparks between opposites, and it’s all a bit too familiar.But what appears at first like a mundane exercise in remedial discipline sours into something more sinister. The P.A. system starts to glitch, no one can tell the time, and bars slide over the window as the school goes into after-hours lockdown (sound is by Lee Kinney). Take away the desks, and the scuffed floors and cinder-block walls could just as easily be the setting of a prison (the set is by Reid Thompson and Kamil James). And the flicker of fluorescents and red glow of the hall suggest a kind of purgatory (lighting is by Cha See).As the kids clash and open up to one another, surreal elements creep up, appearing to represent the systems and obstacles — poverty, redlining, over policing — that can entrap many Black people in rooms like this, and worse. And the students’ back stories illustrate how they try to maneuver against such repression: Dasani has stolen food because she’s hungry; Mikayla made her own too-short skirt out of necessity. (“You think I got money for all that extra fabric? I look sexy on a budget.”)Under the direction of Miranda Haymon, the performances have an exaggerated quality that keeps the characters at a distance, despite the action being in your face. Each one has subtler, more grounded moments, but there’s a heightened sense to their personas that hints they’re stand-ins for broader ideas. Even as the even-keeled Erika, Boateng has an almost mechanical, doll-like carriage that evokes the concept of what it takes to escape social constraints rather than someone with one foot out the door.As in his previous work “Tambo & Bones,” Harris toys with stereotypes about Blackness in order to turn them inside out, pointing to the history, circumstances and motivations behind ways of thinking and behavior. It’s an exercise performed for the benefit of audiences presumed to be in need of instruction, and for some it will no doubt be an eye-opening lesson.But there’s a restlessness inherent to every schoolroom timeout, and to theatergoers being positioned as pupils. What happens once we can see people for who they are and then dig deeper into their contradictions? Understanding how lives are shaped by their limitations, as Harris details here with an ultimately pat sort of logic, is foundational to social justice. But in order to see that there’s more to people than what keeps them in margins, first we may have to set them free.Exception to the RuleThrough June 26 at the Black Box Theater at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More