Come Home - The Legend of Daddy Hall: getting through the swamp won't necessarily get one home
28 May 2024 - Photos by Cylla Von Tiedemann

Come Home - The Legend of Daddy Hall opens on a landscape that evokes a swamp. Spanish moss hangs as a curtain, partially obscuring a crumbling dock jutting out amongst reeds and grasses, some scaffolding supporting a cello and keyboards, and an array of rocks and logs. It is highly realistic in the manner of a Disney animation. But realism is not the aim here, this is a poetic exploration of a man's life as seen from a sort of limbo where the ghosts of his past come to confront or comfort him. But it is also the poetic exploration of contemporary racial microaggressions, confronting and contrasting them with the impossibility of escaping either slavery or the spectre of it. But it is also a comedic exploration of what makes a man overcompensate romantically in a futile attempt to balance out his own constraints. Being sexually potent to deny his social impotence. They are an intriguing trio of explorations that don't quite weave together and, sadly, remain partially obscured as if by that poetic Spanish moss.

Audrey Dwyer's script is, here's that word again, poetic, and takes advantage of that form's ability to be non-linear and wide ranging. Director Mike Payette (Choir Boy, Cockroach, Angelique) applies genre after genre to the words so that we get dance, synchronized movement, drama, comedy, mime and lots of special effects. The individual components work beautifully, but it is questionable if the entirety ever gels into an emotional experience or coherent theme. The most glaring example is the orchestra, the musicians Spy Dénommé-Welch and Catherine Magowan aka Unsettle Scores, who provide accompaniment, dramatic percussion, wistful melodies and some new-agey annoying acoustics. They work very hard to bridge the gaps in the timeline, but the connection is then made, simply and eloquently, by a few a cappella phrases from Billy Holiday's "Strange Fruit" sung casually, hauntingly, by Troy Adams (Rose, Love Train). In that one instance we see the links between the past and the present and understand what haunts both Daddy Hall and his descendants. It's no mistake that Adams' character is named "Billie."

Adams pops up in the midst of John "Daddy" Hall's stint in purgatory to express, poetically, his outrage at the everyday microaggressions that plague a Black man to the point where they are actual aggressions. Adams sonorous voice makes a line like "The intended, the accidental and the ignorant, they all hurt the same," resonate on a gut level. Once we figure out his connection to John "Daddy" Hall, the interludes are less jarring and even more welcome. Adams has a hard time fading into the background when not centre stage, but he is not the only one. The cast is lively and always in motion, always trying to discreetly move props but crowding the stage with charisma. Brandon Oakes is stoic in dual roles as is Nicole Joy-Fraser. They play idealized Indigenous characters who are part of an utopian community that isn't quite utopian enough for Hall to call it home. Helen Belay is best in spitfire mode, but she also plays innocence and fragility pushed to respond convincingly. Emerjade Simms brings so much grace and maternal strength to her characters, that she almost sells an awkward bird metaphor that inspires much flapping of arms.

At the centre of it all is Daren A Herbert (Yerma, Choir Boy, Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train, Onegin, If/Then, ;Do You Want What I Have Got?) as John "Daddy" Hall. Initially bewildered by the events swirling around him, Herbert then adapts to each scenario, becoming a child, a clumsy slick seducer, a determined hero, a man broken by grief. There is one remarkable sequence where Herbert cascades through an extreme array of emotions, from laughter to literal tears, in mere seconds. One marvels at the skill and intensity he brings to bear, but is also aware that the text and context is leaving us remote enough to be able to admire it instead of feel it. While Herbert may be able to expose every raw nerve of Hall's experiences, the good and the bad, Come Home is still hiding it behind poetic moss. Perhaps that is the only way we are ever going to be able to handle the horrors Come Home chronicles. There is a poignant powerful symbol in the map to freedom that is written in Hall's corn rows. The way to find home is in his cultural singularity but, as he laments breaking our hearts, "Freedom is one thing, where is security?" Getting through the swamp won't always get one home.