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“Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone,” goes the song, and in Moon’s leisurely paced psychodrama about a woman who returns to her rural Florida-coast hometown following the deaths of her mother and child, the sun is virtually eclipsed. But the sun and Moon aren’t always in perfect alignment in MPAACT’s production.
The suppressed pain and guilt weighing down Marie, an Atlanta schoolteacher compelled to reconnect with her roots after caring for her cancer-stricken mother, is registered with understated nuance by Perry and by Moon’s musical language. And the talismanic device Moon employs—a “burial doll” Marie stitches throughout that’s a superstitious ritual of the local women—subtly conveys the play’s premise: You can’t be whole if you don’t make peace with the past and tend to your own pain.
But Moon embroiders his tone poem with too many plot threads. When Marie’s estranged father (smooth-as-silk Harmon), a wandering jazzman straight out of the August Wilson playbook, comes home to reconcile with his daughter and encounters a younger version of himself in Marie’s should-I-stay-or-should-I-go fiancé (House), the conflicted-male conundrum detracts from Marie’s need to forgive herself, and from Moon’s exploration of women as the bedrock of their families and communities. Elsewhere, Talley as Marie’s old boyfriend, an incorrigible playboy, provides comic relief but is otherwise superfluous.
Ultimately, though, Stillwell’s actors shed light on Moon’s dark corners and power through a less-sluggish second act toward a refreshingly ambiguous conclusion that doesn’t provide easy answers.
