HooDoo Love at The Collective Theatre

★★☆☆☆

The Collective Theatre. By Katori Hall. Dir. Nelsan Ellis. With Lynn Wactor, LaRoyce Hawkins, Mark Smith, Toni Lynice Fountain. 2hrs 35mins; one intermission.

Playwright Katori Hall made her Broadway debut with last year’s The Mountaintop, a fictionalized imagining of Martin Luther King Jr.’s last night on Earth. Its relative simplicity (single set, two actors) has helped make Hall one of this season’s 11 most-produced playwrights, according to industry org TCG (she’s also the only woman on the list). Such restraint isn’t on display in Hall’s 2007 work. Also set in Memphis, a few decades before The Mountaintop, HooDoo Love centers on Toulou (Lynn Wactor), a young woman from the Delta with dreams of singing in Beale Street’s blues clubs. Toulou loves bluesman Ace of Spades (LaRoyce Hawkins), but she’s not his only love. Meanwhile, she’s tracked down by her preacher brother, Jib (Mark Smith), who’s got devilish designs on his sister. Toulou asks neighbor Candy Lady (Toni Lynice Fountain), a colorful conjure woman, to help her keep Ace and lose Jib, but all doesn’t go as planned.

Toulou’s troubles might be read as stand-ins for the larger struggles of African-American women defining themselves in relation to men; “bad men stay, good men go away,” Candy Lady tells her. Hall’s script contains snippets of original blues songs written for Toulou, but director Nelsan Ellis (known to HBO viewers as True Blood’s Lafayette) farms them out to another singer, the sultry Opal Demetria Staples, who steps to a downstage mic between every scene.The effect is distancing, seeming to stretch out a production that’s already languidly paced. Of the actors, only the sly Fountain appears to fully grasp the play’s deeper themes.—Kris Vire

Time Out Chicago issue no. 387, October 4–10, 2012