“By God, woman!  Can’t you see I’m thinkin’?”

Everybody’s got their demons.  Sometimes it’s sex and you’re addled and attached to a prurient and insatiable beast.  Sometimes it’s drugs and you’re stuck to the repeated rush of chemoxizine or a simple escape from the end of your workday.  Sometimes it’s the rock n roll lifestyle and you starve yourself so you can keep fitting into your leather pants.

No matter what your demon, it helps to name it.  You gotta get it out in order to get it out.  Back in the 1930s, America had some demons, and Erskine Caldwell and Jack Kirkland spent some time trying to name them in Tobacco Road.

“PLACE: The back country, Georgia – thirty miles or so from Augusta.  It is a famished, desolate land, once given over to the profitable raising of tobacco, then turned into small cotton plantations, which have been so intensively and stupidly cultivated as to exhaust the soil.  Poverty, want, squalor, degeneracy, pitiful helplessness and grotesque, tragic lusts have stamped a lost, outpaced people with the mark of inevitable end.  Unequipped to face a changing economic program, bound up in tradition, ties, and prejudices, they unknowingly face extinction.  It is a passing scene and fast fading, hurling the lie at nature’s mercy and challenging a God who reputedly looks after his own.  Grim humor pervades all, stalking side by side with tragedy on the last short mile which leads to complete, eventual elimination.  The pride and hope of a once aggressive group, pioneers in a great new world, thus meet ironic conclusion.  The world moves on, unmindful of their ghosts.”

That is, America was unmindful of these ghosts until they were named in Tobacco Road.  Wildly popular for years, one New York Times review of the play in 1933 said: “The theatre has never sheltered a fouler or more degenerate parcel of folks than the hardscrabble family of Lester. . . . It is the blunt truth of the characters he is describing, and it leaves a malevolent glow of poetry. . . .  Plays as clumsy and rudderless as ‘Tobacco Road’ seldom include so many scattered items that leave such a vivid impression.”

Even 75+ years later, I agree with this assessment.  The play itself is clumsy and rudderless.  The characters – and I mean all of them – are foul and degenerate.  After only a few minutes, I wrote down: “These are BAD people!”  Though, as actors, I thought Mel Christian (Sister Bessie Rice) and Dane Albright (Lov Bensey) were ‘specially good.  All that evilhood makes it hard to watch.  And hard to love, especially for someone who’s always preferred Cheers to Seinfeld.  But there’s a malevolent poetry to it.  And it’s memorable in the same way you’re guaranteed to remember every time you’ve been hit in the face.  That’s what they call a vivid impression.

No one said naming demons was easy, but admitting the problem is often the first step.  When there’s a relationship problem, you’ve got to bring it out in the open.  When there’s a work problem, you’ve got to discuss it to make things better.  And when there’s a family problem, you’ve got to admit that you’re actually related to those people.  They are your family, like it or not, even dysfunctional as heck.  Only then can you work on fixin’ it or just gettin’ on past it.

Thank you to Mel Christian, Michael Walters, and the Birmingham Festival Theatre for putting on this challenging and difficult play.