We build the world we live in, every day, with every choice we make

The Sugar Wife

What is your sugar? The Artistic Home brings the United States premiere of The Sugar Wife to Theater Wit. As pertinent today as in the 1850’s it portrays, The Sugar Wife, written by Elizabeth Kuti and directed by Kevin Hagan, is a powerful exploration of what it means to hope in the face of the brutalities, the compromises, and the hypocrisies of life. Are some compromises inescapable? Are some hypocrisies acceptable? How do we make our way in an unjust and troubled world, and – perhaps most importantly – do we face the costs of our choices? We all have our price, we all make bargains and compromises – whether we look ourselves in the mirror or not.

Playwright Elizabeth Kuti is an English actor, scholar, and professor of Literature Film and Theatre Studies at Essex University. The Sugar Wife won the 2006 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, described as ‘the oldest and largest playwriting prize for women+ writing for the English-speaking theatre.’

Director Kevin Hagan dives into the play he envisions as a Celtic knot entangling the personal and political, the cultural and spiritual. Hagan has directed for Shattered Globe Theatre and Eclipse Theatre Company. He earned an MFA in Scenic Design from DuPaul University’s Theatre School, and received a Jeff Nomination for Best Scenic Design for his work on Our Lady of 121st Street by Eclipse. Through this production Hagan urges us to engage in the delicate and troubling process of examining the measure of our lives, because “the only sin from which we cannot be saved is to give up hope.”

But hope is a tricky thing, and the future is inextricably shackled to harsh realities of the past and the present.

Sarah Worth (Ashayla Calvin) is a woman freed from enslavement in the US deep south. She travels the abolitionist speaker circuit, selling the truths of slavery. Her companion, photographer Alfred Darby (John LaFlambboy), is the agent of her freedom, having purchased Sarah and freed her. Hannah Tewkley (Annie Hogan) is a Quaker intent on her good works for the poor, including a comic but troubling series of interactions with Martha Ryan (Kristin Collins), an invalid released from an asylum. Hannah convinces her sugar, tea and coffee tycoon husband Samuel Tewkley (Todd Wojcik) to host Sarah and Alfred. In the first interactions between Hannah and Samuel we see the cracks that will spread until the marriage is consumed. Over the weeks the four share the Tewkley’s mansion, secrets are revealed, alliances are made and corrupted and reformed, and hypocrisies are laid bare.

Almost all share a level of obliviousness to the bias of their own positions. Samuel is insistent that his is a symbiotic relationship, wealthy philanthropist to ever-present poor, believing the workhouse a boon to society and washing any incidental evils through Hannah’s good works. Hannah is a Quaker abolitionist living in a mansion built on sugar and tobacco that she insists is made pious by ripping out gilt mirrors and velvet drapes. Martha sees America as a promised land, and waxes poetic about it to the formerly enslaved Sarah. Alfred Darby seems to have made the purest most ethical choices, but he is far more complex. Sarah alone faces the harsh bargains she’s made, and is under no illusions about her choices and present circumstances.

We see, clearest of all, the knowing and self-serving hypocrisy of the patriarch, Samuel Tewkley (Todd Wojcik). A fine upstanding gentleman, but ‘whose conscience is his own. Samuel gradually confesses to an increasingly problematic range of ‘vices’ for which he professes no shame. Wojcik plays him straight, with no undercurrent of internal conflict or self-awareness, a choice that makes the character even more disturbing. Samuel seems untouched and untouchable, and Wojcik’s unabashed expansiveness drives that home. It’s easy to be an eternal optimist when one sits upon a sugar throne. Wojcik fully realizes Samuel’s one exposed point of inner turmoil, wrestling in solitude with the cracks in his marital relationship.

Annie Hogan gives us a gorgeously complex Hannah Tewkley, as a woman who struggles to maintain a fragile sort of strength, teetering between public determination and an almost entirely private crumbling. Hannah is determined that her good works – financed by her husband’s sugar, tea and tobacco fortune – and her pious plainness in daily life, will make her marriage an acceptable bargain. When she is confronted with the hypocrisies of her choices (and her husband’s deceptions) she is freed to embrace her taboo desires and soar into a dream of another life. Hogan seduces with her fierce delicacy, the fervent need for spring to bring renewal, and her transformation into hope with spreading wings. The conclusion Hogan lives is visceral.

Hope is different for everyone. Sarah’s was desperate, forged in the vilest depravity of human existence; the experience of chattel slavery. Calvin is riveting when reliving Sarah’s leap into the chance for a new existence. The role of Sarah demands an impressive range, and Calvin handles it with aplomb. In the polite company of the Tewkley mansion, Calvin draws us in with a presence that is quietly compelling; the looming stillness of the mountain born of a volcano, the lurking power of the ocean under purple skies. When Calvin brings Sarah’s voice into the Tewkley’s domesticity she rings with the depth and hard wisdom of her history. Interspersed through the family scenes are segments of Sarah’s abolitionist lectures – heavy, of course. These lectures are not pieces of dry academia, but potent echoes of her familial past. Calvin pronounces these in a flowing cadence of professional detachment, until she cannot, breaking open into living the emotion. It is achingly gorgeous as Calvin embraces a love story, and real, raw and powerful pain as she relives a violent trauma. Sarah is the conscience and the catalyst of the story, and Calvin delivers her key lines with a bullseye potency. The final exchange between Sarah and Alfred is a revelation.

Overflowing with self-righteousness and barely-restrained contempt, John LaFlamboy gives us Alfred Darby, the hero that also isn’t. LaFlamboy shines as a rebel-with-a-cause who is so natural he could have been plucked from any modern activist circle. On the surface Alfred is a disillusioned daguerretype artist, traveling in support of Sarah and abolition after denouncing his problematic family business. This creates a natural tension between Alfred and his hosts, which is played subtly and deftly until it explodes into confrontation.

Kristin Collins is a spicy, sarcastic delight as Martha Ryan, a sickly woman freed from an asylum who is the reluctant recipient of Hannah’s charitable attentions. Collins’ multi-layered delivery creates comedy jewels with the simplest exchanges. Underneath Martha’s prickly, scarred exterior Collins allows us glimpses of the human being made open and vulnerable in expressing her genuine needs; powerless but hopeful. In a moving contrapoint, as Collins drops Martha’s defenses Hannah’s distance and barriers are exposed.

The play spins a grotesquerie in Hannah playing at “salvation” with her pet project, Martha. She chastises – the only sin from which we cannot be saved is to give up hope – but the hope that is offered is doling out pristine white socks and bible reading lessons. What Martha requests is refused; charity is what the donor deems appropriate. Hope is demanded, but agency is denied. The insistence on hope in the face of privation is a statement of willfully-ignorant privilege that defines Hannah. In a heartbreaking moment we see, in sharp juxtaposition, that even in the moment Hannah could have offered deliverance she still does not. And even the pittance she offers is too late.

The talented creative team includes award winning-composer and sound designer Peter Wahlback, exquisite period clothing by Costume Designer Rachel Lambert, surprising and steamy interactions by two-time Jeff Nominee Intimacy Designer David Blixt, Lighting Design by Ellie Fey, period Properties Design by Randy Rozler, and Dialect Design by Charlotte Markle.

The Sugar Wife is a masterpiece of a play, a kaleidoscope of humanity’s complex relationships – with each other, with hope and hypocrisy, and with morality in an immoral world.

Highly Recommended

Reviewed by Soleil Rodrigue

The Sugar Wife presented by The Artistic Home, now through May 3, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 PM with matinees Sundays at 3:00 PM. All shows are at Theater Wit, 1229 West Belmont Avenue, Chicago

Tickets are $15-$35 and may be purchased by visiting theArtisticHome.org

Additional information about this and other area productions can be found by visiting www.theatreinchicago.com