Home
Broadway review by Adam Feldman The revivals that Kenny Leon has directed on Broadway form something like a syllabus of modern African-American drama, from Loraine Hansberry to August Wilson to Suzan-Lori Parks. Last season, that project brought him to Purlie Victorious, in which a Black man travels to his birthplace in the South to reclaim his place there in triumph; now Leon follows it with a play in which a different rural homecoming seems less happy, at least at first. But don’t give up too fast: Home, after all, is where the heart is. Cephus Miles (Tory Kittles) is a broken man at the start of Samm-Art Williams’s play, which is now at the Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theatre. After a long exile—first in prison, then in a big city up north—Cephus is back in his not-so-subtly-named hometown of Cross Roads, North Carolina. In a rocking chair on the porch of his childhood home, he seems to have nowhere to go; his right hand has a tremor, and the noisy local kids think he’s a ghost. (Like all of the roles except Cephus, these taunting brats are played by the gifted duo of Brittany Inge and Stori Ayers, who move among dozens of characters with big swings of affect and voice.) But for Home, which debuted downtown in 1979 under the aegis of the Negro Ensemble Company before moving to a successful Broadway run the next year, Cephus’s weary return after many trials is not a defeat. Like Cephus himself, the play has an abiding faith in the eventual goodness of the Lord above—despite a