Zora HOward’s Stew is good and ready
Shattered Globe Theatre opened the Chicago premier of Zora Howard’s 2021 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Drama, Stew, at Theatre Wit and has left audiences wondering the burdens they have laid upon their own mother’s kitchen tables. What are the crumbs, the sleepless nights, the sounds that reverberate in her memory each quiet morning? The play is a look at life’s moments in the in-between, in-between men, in-between tragedy. Howard’s play rings of the things — the small things — that get forgotten in the befores and afters. And when the moments are big, you see the strength in the tribe of women holding up the foundations.
The play takes place in one room, the kitchen of the matriarch’s home. The women on stage are all related across generations: the grandmother Mama (Velma Austin), her two daughters Lillian (Jazzma Pryor) and Nelly (Jasmine Cheri Rush), and a grandchild Lil’ Mama (Demetra Dee). It spans one morning in the character’s lives as they prepare a meal for Mama’s church. As the four women embark in and out of the kitchen layers of their relationships are revealed, as well as each ones secrets, struggles, and a heavy dash of silliness that can only be experienced with family.
The production team, most notably, scenic designer Sotirios Livaditis and props designer Persephone Lawrence-Wescott, thought of every detail and vantage point for the audience to experience. There were crumbs on the table to wipe away, steam from the pot of stew simmering, even the way the fridge opened to allow audience members to see it fully stocked inside let you feel like you were seated in the kitchen itself awaiting a cup of tea instead of in a row on the other side of the fourth wall.
Directed by Malkia Stampley, the cast took Howard’s fast paced, layered dialogue and never once allowed their tone or expression to betray their unique familial role. The sibling banter and mild poking fun at Mama, while filled with humor and levity, were clearly building to a boiling over caused by the words being left unspoken. As the stew being made faces its own scalding and do-overs, so do the women as their secrets are uncovered. As hidden truths are revealed, what is said and happens afterword is the essential ingredient of this play.
In Howard’s play and in all of our mother’s kitchens, there is a lot to talk about. One item that gets discussed over and over is women. What it is like to be a woman, the roles we fall into, the roles we are expected to fill, the “good” people we are expected to be. But what happens when we have done all that is set in our path and still end up unhappy? What happens when we realize we gave it all away? Nelly and Lillian both face the aftermath of men sucking them dry. One’s confession is filled with seduction and the powerful hand of lust wringing every ounce of self out without a worry of what comes next. The other yearns for more in a different way, for the moment when she was full, before she gave it all away for a husband, for supposed love. The only one left questioning why, or more likely how to avoid such a fate, is Lil’ Mama. She has the seen the treacherous path that is being absorbed and morphed by men when you put all your hopes and dreams into who they are instead of who you are.
These women all find themselves again. In a pure sense they go back to the start. They go back to their mother when all has gone wrong. Don’t we all go running to our mothers in the end. Despite the fear of disappointment, of breaking her heart, there is an inherent knowledge that your mother will soothe, she will take on the burden, she will shoulder and bare. One can’t watch Howard’s Stew and not think about the countless mothers who had been asked for as their child joined a horrid statistic, faced a life that wasn’t what they had dreamed, looked into the reflective surface of an unfulfilled potential and wondered, how did I get here? Your Mama, she’s ready though, this is the day she’s been fearing since you were born.
Stew is on stage at Theatre Wit until Oct. 22.
