Things of Dry Hours explores the relationship between blacks and whites at a time when both races faced injustice and want during the Depression. It asks the question, is a man justified in hoping that shared struggle can overcome ignorance and prejudice.
What This Show Is About
Things of Dry Hours takes place during one week in 1932 in the home that Tice Hogan shares with his widowed daughter, Cali. It’s a time of growing struggle between the unemployed and the employers. Tice scratches out a living teaching Sunday school, but he also, ashamedly, relies on Cali’s doing the laundry of Birmingham’s well-to-do.
Tice has a passion for the redemption offered in the Bible, but he also has a passion for the promises of Karl Marx, and he is a leader in the local Communist Party.
Along comes Corbin Teel, the epitome of the dumb, Southern, white cracker. He’s running from a possible murder and threatens to expose Tice’s Party activities unless they take him in.
Over the week, Tice tries to reach something in Corbin, to start some spark of caring for his own betterment and the betterment of others. He does this knowing Corbin’s interest in Cali, the danger it puts them all in and the likelihood that Corbin is playing them.
At times poetic, at times mystical, at times violent, Things of Dry Hours examines what it means to be black and white in this country, in a time when nothing seemed clearly set down in black and white.
Strong Performances
Things of Dry Hours is a 2004 play by Blackburn Prize-winner Naomi Wallace. Delroy Lindo, who was Tony-nominated for the original Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and is a movie star as well, plays Tice. He brings to the role the balance a 1932 black man had to live with in a segregated society while working for the equality of all races. (Whites and blacks work side-by-side in Birmingham’s Communist Party). As Cali, Roslyn Ruff explores how a woman finds an outlet for emotions long bottled up in a loveless marriage. Garret Dillahunt, recently seen in No Country for Old Men, is Corbin Teel. He’s a man you can’t trust and can’t really dislike, either, despite his doing so much to warrant it.
The play has some wonderful moments, two in particular are a mystic sequence in which a delighted Cali watches the sheets she washes take flight and an interchange between Tice and Corbin, as Tice tries to make the oblivious white man understand the advantages his skin gives him that he takes for granted.
Tension on Slow Boil
There are scattered missteps. It’s hard to accept some of the learned remarks Corbin makes when pains are taken to establish how unintelligent and unlearned he is. But I wouldn’t let that stop me from enjoying the New York Theatre Workshop’s production.
Things of Dry Hours is directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who won a Tony for acting in Seven Guitars on Broadway. He shows a deft hand in keeping the tension - which lies below the surface of every scene - from boiling over until the right moment. Similarly, while we know from a fourth-wall-breaking prologue by Lindo that things must not turn out too well, there is an undercurrent of hope right along side the tension, that Santiago-Hudson never lets slip away.
In the end, it’s hope that wins out in Things of Dry Hours, and it is enjoyable getting there.
Where and When
- New York Theatre Workshop
79 E. 4th Street
- Show Times and Tickets
- Opening: June 8, 2009
- Closing: June 28, 2009
- Genre: Drama
- Run Time: Two hours, 30 minutes (with intermission)
- Advisories: Mature audiences
Nudity