Review Reviews: ’Bov Water by Celeste Jennings ’18

It’s a rare delight when a play presents rural life with dignity but not romanticism. Northern Stage’s latest performance, ‘Bov Water, written by Celeste Jennings, a Dartmouth ’18, delivers compelling visions and revisions of the black ancestral experience in the agrarian American South. Jennings’ careful presentation of the fraught and tense movements of black Americans through geographies, classes, and generations captures the complexities of the urban-rural divide better than any theatrical performance that we have ever seen.

Set in the backdrop of oversized clothes lines running between towering branches covered in Spanish moss, three black women reckon with elusive truths about their family’s history and posterity between 1876 and 2009 in three condensed acts. The women rotate through roles, bringing a confused continuity that reflects the confusing dynamics of suppressed and repressed recollection of intergenerational trauma. The audience is forced to join the characters in trying to decipher the meandering history of a family reeling from the aftermath of the Civil War and the evolution of slavery into sharecropping and Jim Crow.

Although Jennings’ writing develops each individual character in each generation to an unusual degree for how little time she allots them, the more impressive display of her narrative prowess is found in the way in which she crafts the family as a unified whole in the form of one actress playing out distinct roles in successive generations. ‘Bov Water is the story of a family, but that family is greater than the sum of each family member’s qualities. Jennings brings the family to life while at the same time deconstructing each individual’s mortality. Between each “act,” the women repeat the refrain, “I am from…,” filling in variations of ancestral qualities and physical associations with Mississippi. The women wander the stage like specters—ephemeral black bodies moving and existing transgenerationally.

One might assume that the play would be a tendentious meditation on the oppression of black Americans from the subject, the title’s vernacular, and the academic background of its writer. But you know what they say about assumptions… Whatever preconceived notions the audience may have had before stepping into the theater are torn asunder by the second act. Through the particular lens of the black experience in the US from the antebellum period to the nearly modern day, the play treats humanistic themes in an incisive and poignant manner. Lydia’s divorce from her psychologically troubled, irreparably changed, yet kind-hearted Vietnam War veteran husband treats the themes of true love, change in the object thereof, and the melancholy of inevitable separation so evocatively that at least one of the writers of this review shed more than a few tears.

Tilly, Lydia’s best friend, also struggles with wounds of the heart; her husband, a holy man—a priest, no less—cheats on her with the younger usher, precipitating a crisis of confidence, self-esteem, and depression. These topics do not require a concession to viewpoint epistemology; they are universal obstacles encountered and overcome by virtually every individual at some point throughout his or her life across the globe, time, and all conceivable immutable characteristics.
One final ubiquitous struggle treated by the play’s brilliant writer is that of socio-economic, educational, and class divides between friends from a shared background. Lydia goes off to a fancy liberal arts college where she learns about the Black Panther Party, Marxism, and activism, and assumes a humanities major. She waits to marry and divorces before ever having a child. Tilly, on the other hand, jumps into marriage and the workforce right away, becoming a wife, hair stylist, and mother at a tender age. The tension between the two women while Lydia is away at college is relieved as they help each other recover from professional and romantic struggles. Who can’t relate to being welcomed back by neglected friends after being overburdened by academics and flights of romance? We all can. ‘Bov Water is a masterclass on placing the black American experience center stage in a narrative context that involves all human beings who have indulged their hopes of a better future and true love, and suffered the reality of shattered dreams and broken hearts.