It's wild conjecture, but I wonder if playwright Marcus Gardley ever heard the "Movin' On Up" theme song from The Jeffersons in his head as he wrote The House That Will Not Stand. There are moments in this world-premiere production at Berkeley Rep when we may feel we are approaching the mountaintop with Martin Luther King, only to get a wisecrack that the housekeeper played by Marla Gibbs might have fired at George Jefferson. And even the inspirational oration at the play's end promises a movin'-on-up world even if it is decades, centuries, in the future.
That The House That Will Not Stand is set in 1836 New Orleans also makes room for voodoo, African spiritual re-rooting, slavery, an occasionally reanimated corpse, pulpit-worthy polemics, and the largely forgotten interracial social construct known as placage. But in this handsome black household, run with the iron elegance of a Dowager Countess of Treme, high teas and costume balls are not unknown.
That Bay Area playwright Gardley is able to interweave elements so seemingly disparate, and have these tones be able to spin without causing whiplash, is a remarkable feat of playwriting �" almost like a dramatic variation on those variety artists who kept rows of plates spinning. Sometimes the plates do fall, and there are places in the play when a moment or idea may crash, but soon another plate is spinning in its place in director Patricia McGregor's crisp production.
Until the Louisiana Purchase made New Orleans part of the United States and subject to its laws on race, prosperous white citizens could choose to start a second family by paying a kind of dowry to the mother of a fair-skinned mulatto or quadroon, in the parlance of the day. The crisis that sets all of those plot plates spinning is the death of Lazare, a white businessman who had acquired through a placage arrangement the woman who would become the mother of his three grown daughters. But the changing laws have nullified Lazare's will that would have left the house and other parts of his estate to his second family, and a solution to this calamity is to market one of the daughters at an upcoming quadroon ball.
It would be an easy solution, but Beartrice, for reasons that gradually emerge and will give moral heft to the play, is adamantly opposed despite her eldest daughter's eagerness to land a rich, handsome, and white variation on a husband. Lizan Mitchell is simply fabulous as the imperious, no-nonsense Beartrice, still retaining the beauty and grace that drew the newly departed Lazare to her decades ago. Beartrice has a tart counterpart in the servant Makeda, and Harriet D. Foy shoots out zingers with delicious deadpan insouciance.
Tiffany Rachelle Stewart, Flor De Liz Perez, and Joniece Abbott-Pratt play Beartrice's daughters with coming-of-age skittishness, while Petronia Paley has the dual role of a gossipy neighbor and an addled aunt mostly confined to her room. Ray Reinhardt brings powerful bluster to the role of Lazare, who has a surprising amount of dialogue for a character we first meet embalmed and ready for burial.
The House That Will Not Stand, co-commissioned with Yale Rep where it will later run, is a play that takes you to unfamiliar territories, and even as you get your bearings, it twists the plot in unexpected ways. It can go for righteous heights or play for low laughs, but whatever it does, this House party is never boring.
The House That Will Not Stand will run at Berkeley Rep through March 16. Tickets are $29-$59. Call (510) 647-2949 or go to www.berkeleyrep.org.