City Lit's production of "Pudd'nhead Wilson," adapted from Mark Twain's novel by Terry McCabe and Brian Pastor, and directed by McCabe, suffers from an uneven tone—but the blame can be placed squarely on Twain. The author's career was torn between his brilliantly comical early work and his more somber later work, and "Pudd'nhead" is one of his most schizoid stories.
Roxana (Noelle Hardy), a mixed-race slave, endeavors to free her infant child from slavery by switching him in the cradle with the infant child of her master. Because her child, now named "Tom" (Ehren Fournier), is mostly white, no one ever suspects the deception and he grows up to be a spoiled, self-serving scoundrel. The play is filled with colorful characters, such as the titular "pudd'nhead" (Kingsley Day), a lawyer whose wry sense of humor is widely misunderstood, and two conjoined twins from Italy (Dan Howard and Craig Newman). The more comical aspects of the show contrast violently with its tragic heart, which is the relationship between Roxana and her son, who is utterly ungrateful when he discovers the truth of his parentage. Hardy offers a truly heart-wrenching performance as the abused, scorned but continually loving mother. It is to both Hardy's and Twain's credit that Roxana is a complex, flawed character rather than the saintly slave caricature often found in fiction.
Often, the audience often doesn't know whether to laugh or gasp in horror. The play does not trivialize the horrors of slavery, but the characters do, even the relatively sympathetic ones. It is simply accepted as the natural order. Despite the uncomfortable atmosphere, the show is nonetheless worth seeing; after all, this is not a topic with which one should be comfortable.
Reviewed by Centerstage!
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