NEW YORK, NY.- The first thing you see upon taking your seat at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn is a worn-out double bed.

That is only fitting for “Wedding Band,” a 1962 play by Alice Childress about ancient conflict and intimate relations. How much human wrangling has transpired in or over that one piece of furniture? Whether wrought iron, four-poster, straw or “enseamèd,” the bed is where we enact the drama of who may love and how.

It is certainly the center of contention in “Wedding Band,” which has not been seen in a major New York production since its Public Theater premiere in 1972. The revival that opened Sunday — in a Theater for a New Audience production directed by Awoye Timpo — makes the case that the 50-year wait was far too long.

Which is to say that “Wedding Band,” despite its comfortably yarny, old-fashioned construction, is a blazing, upsetting, necessary work for today. Its specific subject is the relationship between Julia, a Black woman, and Herman, a white man, who in the South Carolina of 1918 cannot marry — nor could they have until 1967, when the Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, overturned anti-miscegenation laws on the books in 16 states. Looked at more broadly, “Wedding Band” is about the miscegenation of America itself, a marriage still far from happy more than 50 years later.

That the play’s focus is Julia (Brittany Bradford) already makes it a crucial contribution to a dramatic literature that too often looks at the issue from the white side. “Wedding Band,” which carries the subtitle “A Love/Hate Story in Black and White,” takes place in the Black neighborhood of Charleston where Childress was born; the whites, for once, are outsiders. Until they arrive, the play confidently sketches the local scene with the watercolor nostalgia of affection tinged with anxiety.

That anxiety at first seems to be more about class than about race. The grand and “gawd”-fearing landlady, Fanny (Elizabeth Van Dyke), a “self-appointed 50-year-old representative of her race,” struts about minding her tenants’ business and lording it over their poverty. Lula (Rosalyn Coleman) fashions paper flowers for pennies and frets about her soldier son; Mattie (Brittany-Laurelle) makes candy, raises her daughter and minds a local white girl called Princess.

It is a typically dry comment that Princess has more rights than any of the Black women; Mattie can enter the local park only “if I got you by the hand,” she tells the girl mildly.

But not for long is the shock of the totality of racism in the Black characters’ world mitigated by their resignation to it. Indeed, it is a dramatic trap. Their chatter about smaller concerns — debts, gossip, hair, mail — slyly leads us to think we are in for a modestly entertaining and mostly cheerful parable of racial accommodation that soon embraces love.

Far from it. For one thing, accommodation, for Julia and Herman, is impossible. Even after years together — the play begins on their 10th anniversary — they are not only unable to marry but also even to cohabit in safety. When Herman visits Julia at Fanny’s enclave, the latest in a series of ever-more-remote accommodations she has been forced to find, the other women are scandalized. It is not that they hate white people: “You mustn’t hate white folks,” Lula instructs. “Don’tcha believe in Jesus?”

What troubles the women, especially Fanny, is the danger to Julia and to the community if a white man is found in a Black woman’s bed. And Herman (Thomas Sadoski) is not just white but poor: a barely scraping-by baker from a family he describes as “redneck crackers.” Because he still owes his mother, who staked him the money to open his shop, more than he has ever been able to earn, he and Julia can neither live openly in South Carolina nor move, he feels, to a state where the laws are different.




It is therefore no idle symbol that the wedding band he gives Julia for their anniversary is presented on a chain to wear around her neck; he knows she cannot wear it on her finger. And as the genteel setup of the first act turns to tragedy in the second after Herman falls ill, that chain begins to weigh and cut. Unable to call a doctor lest she wind up in jail for miscegenation, Julia is left to the mercy of Herman’s sister (Rebecca Haden) and mother.

That mercy is not forthcoming. The mother, in Veanne Cox’s terrifyingly reptilian performance, can barely contain her disgust long enough to evacuate her son by cover of night. As she spews her racist venom, both Julia and the ailing Herman spill their own, and the hate of the subtitle supplants the love.

Cox’s extended confrontation with Bradford — a cataclysm and catharsis of a country’s worth of mutual fury — is thrilling and awful and important to watch; but so is Bradford alone, even with no lines, when she is forced to leave her bedroom as the whites take over. Sadoski, too, is excellent, in the less explosive role of a man who discovers, as all of us must, that the harm he has done is no less destructive for having been unconscious. The rest of the cast likewise embodies and then throws in our laps the difficulty of love under what amounts to vicious apartheid.

Timpo’s production, with the audience seated on three sides of the long, T-shaped stage, emphasizes that reckoning, forcing us to stare through the story at one another’s reactions. (The set is by Jason Ardizzone-West.) It is also meticulously costumed (by Qween Jean) to pin down the characters’ social status, and sympathetically musicalized, not just in the spirituals and folk songs sung by the cast but also in an exceptionally fine scene-setting score, full of bluesy plaint and pain, by Alphonso Horne.

If the shifts in Julia’s personality are perhaps too sudden, compacted into the course of one weekend, that slight incoherence is one of the play’s pleasures. Even more than Childress’ “Trouble in Mind,” admirably revived last year by the Roundabout Theater Company, “Wedding Band” embraces its characters’ confusions, letting its arguments wander widely instead of making beelines, as is the more recent fashion, toward Big Points. Confusion is in fact the point; how could a story like this pretend to clarity?

It is the useful kind of confusion, though: the kind that jangles but does not preach — and the kind our theater needs more of. When Julia, in despair, cries out, “I don’t want any whiteness in my house,” you feel the house she means includes the one you are sitting in. You may wonder how, in either place, the worn-out double bed of America’s rocky marriage could possibly still be standing.

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Event Information:

'Wedding Band'

Tickets Through May 15 at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Brooklyn; tfana.org. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.