Dark Night of the Myth

Three-quarters of the way through Ngozi Anyanwu’s new play Leroy and Lucy, now playing at Steppenwolf’s Ensemble Theater, a young man named Leroy Johnson picks up a guitar, sings a song about his feelings of weakness and plays his way into history. 

By placing the well-worn myth of blues legend Robert Johnson in conversation with a syncretic blend of gods and supernatural traditions, Anyanwu’s play warns us against readings of myths that limit their subjects to mere cautionary tales. 

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Sorry if you were surprised by the fact that this play, directed by Awoye Timpo, is about Robert Johnson. At the same time, it’s kind of right there in the log line. But it also isn’t really about Robert Johnson. Anyanwu uses the audience’s basic cultural knowledge of Robert Johnson, who died at 27 and became widely notorious only after Eric Clapton covered him, as a test case for her broader dismantling of myth. Many believe that this poor Black kid from nowhere Mississippi sold his soul to the devil to gain his prowess with guitar, but who’s to say that he didn’t spend some honest-to-God time practicing and building his skills?

The myth-maker’s penchant for reducing its subjects is Anyanwu’s greatest concern. The stories of Cleopatra and Lilith are also deployed by Lucy, played with balletic grace and humor by Brittany Bradford, as a warning to the wide-eyed Leroy, played by Jon Michael Hill (who I last saw in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Purpose, also at Steppenwolf, and I hope gets counted on a list somewhere as one of the most reliable actors of his generation. I also hope he makes it to the Broadway transfer!). 

As their relationship flows from that of strangers to that of a teacher and student to that of lovers, Lucy (who is older than Leroy or the audience could ever know) has a consistent warning for Leroy: his ambition to go to Memphis, start a new life, and make music is within his grasp, if he’s willing to prove it to himself. 

Did Robert Johnson sell his soul to the devil to become a great blues musician? Anyanwu posits that his skills were innate, laying dormant for the right conditions to emerge. 

Anyanwu plays incredible temporal games in Leroy and Lucy: Lucy has always been waiting, as she sings at the show’s opening, and she knows what is to come, well beyond the bounds of the play’s setting. While she warns Robert of his impending death and the ways he will be (mis)remembered, she also comes from an ancient time and a place very far from the Mississippi Delta, which I won’t spoil since the revelation in question is a linchpin of the production. There’s something so dramatically rich about the interaction between a mortal character and another who exists out of time, which Awoye Timpo’s direction brilliantly pulls that tension out of Anyanwu’s play.

Timpo’s production is built around Bradford and Hill’s performances in every sense, starting from Andrew Boyce’s bare, abstract, organic-shaped stage, dressed only with a bench. Connor Wang’s sound design and Heather Gilbert’s lighting design are dead simple and unobtrusive, but all of the design elements are full of surprises when called upon. Hill and Bradford’s strong chemistry carries them as they careen from screwball comedy to high-level poetics to some good old-fashioned horny acting. Both actors’ musical talents are among the show’s greatest special effects. Hill’s harmonica playing (shout out to harmonica coach Matthew Skoller!) brings the audience to the precipice of the supernatural and Bradford’s rich vocals envelop the musical portions. When the two sing and play guitar together, however, Anyanwu’s gamble on the form of the play with music pays off.

There’s a lot of hay made and eye-rolling about the play with music (how is it different from the musical? Why are they singing? Should I be singing? Can I use my playbill as a hat?), but it’s avoidable in a play about musicians. Here, Anyanwu cleverly plays with the trope that songs must serve a function in a musical by having her characters retreat to song as a refuge. When they feel insecure or overcome, they sing. And that makes the moment where Johnson does the inevitable and sings “Crossroads” so powerful. Something has led him to his defining song, the song that informed the very myth that Leroy and Lucy wants us to reevaluate.

Which leads me back to the point that I think Anyanwu is making. A myth will never make it through the generations with 100% fidelity to its creation. Mythical figures often get reduced and altered in order to reflect the sentiments of their society, which, in the case of Robert Johnson’s America, is a white Christian hegemony. As Lucy points out, in the same way that Medusa was made to be guilty for her beauty, both Lilith and Robert Johnson are guilty of the sin of ambition. As a result, Johnson’s success could only have been fueled by devilry to those who write history. Things are greater than a Christian-influenced binary of good and evil, and most of the interesting figures of our world live somewhere in between. 

I don’t think Anyanwu wants us to rewrite every single myth that we hold dear. What she is doing, however, is imploring us to reframe our understandings and see how they conveniently uphold the status quo.

The play doesn’t begrudge the mythologizers. What it does do is ask the audience of those mythologies to think critically about what is being expressed. And what’s not to love about that?

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