“Eden”, Yale Rep
Robert Schneider in Connecticut
5 February 2025
My training in dramatic literature was badly bungled: I’d never heard of Steve Carter before last week when I saw his 1976 play Eden revived at Yale Rep. I confided as much to James Bundy, the artistic director after the show. He told me he hadn’t heard of Carter either until about a year ago when a dramaturgy student and a faculty member suggested Eden for production. This lacune in our educations is a mystery: Eden is an accomplished play by a playwright whose mastery of dramatic construction energizes every scene.
Christina Acosta Robinson and Russell G. Jones.
Photo credit: Joan Marcus.
The story introduces us to a West Indian family living in the San Juan Hill neighbourhood of New York City in the autumn of 1927. We meet the wife and children before the father enters. The younger daughter, Annetta (Lauren F. Walker), flirts with Eustace Baylor (Chaundre Hall-Broomfield), the handsome young man next door. Her brothers, Nimrod (Juice Mackins) and Solomon (Prentiss Patrick-Carter), prepare a foot bath for their father. Their other sister, Agnes (Alicia Pilgrim), does her homework from secretarial school. There’s a whole little world on this upper floor of a Phipps house situated in a Black neighbourhood that would later become the Puerto Rican quarter of West Side Story before it was demolished to allow the construction of Lincoln Center.
When the father, Joseph Barton, comes home, we’ve already heard a lot about him. A follower of Marcus Garvey, he rules his immigrant family with an iron hand. He takes American Negroes for ignorant lay-abouts, inferior stock, unworthy of the attention of his daughters or the society of his sons. He’s absorbed the fiery Black nationalism of Garvey, but not his Pan-Africanism. The less he has to do with local Blacks—or Americans of any stripe—the better.
His first task is to quiz his sons on their history homework. “Who was Hannibal’s father?” he asks, in a voice like a razor. When they can’t answer, he repeats the question. It seems quaint to us that New York public schools once tried to teach ancient history to high schoolers, but the question is important to Joseph Barton. Hannibal’s father made his young son swear never to be a friend to Rome, an oath of enmity to which the senior Barton might well subscribe. Colourism, classism and militant atheism are the hardened ideas with which he confronts a fluid century in a cosmopolitan city. He does everything in his power to keep his family pure as distinctions melt all around him and local people, in his eyes scarcely liberated from the cottonfield, speak the King’s English any way they want. The man is full of contradictions. Like Garvey, he idealizes Africa without knowing much about it. His pageantry is a prototype for the fascist rituals to come while his project for rehabilitating victims of colonialism is peppered with Anglophilia.
Photo credit: Joan Marcus.
It goes without saying that Annette’s attraction to the boy next door must be quashed. She must be married quickly to a local shopkeeper, a West Indian like himself. As the star-crossed lovers meet secretly on the roof of the building we think of Romeo and Juliet. But Shakespeare’s lovers die before they can discover their incompatibility. Steve Carter sees further down the road: Annette and Eustace aren’t right for each other. She’s drunk too much of her father’s poison and thinks herself superior. He doesn’t like it when she corrects his grammar. Soon she’s pregnant, however, and marriage is inevitable.
In a conventional drama, the shock should kill her father, but something more ironic ensues. Stricken with a stroke in the act of lashing his future son-in-law with a knotted rope, Joseph Barton finds himself in a wheelchair, unable to speak. He glowers through the wedding festivities.
In the role of the patriarch, Russell G. Jones glows with tyrannical certitude; it’s as apparent in his silences as when he talks. His final act in the play, alone in the room, is to rise totteringly from his wheelchair—feeble but undefeated. The only effective opposition comes from his wife, Florie (Christina Acosta Robinson), who alone sees the perversion beneath his cruelty.
Carter handles family drama with the assurance and stately rhythm of Eugene O’Neill. The father’s episodes of cruelty are counter-hung with all the innocent paraphernalia of realism, from “The cocoa’s ready, papa” to “You have your scarf? It’s cold out there.” The play is a battle of wills shot through with a specific time and place. It’s epic in theme, yet real in its moment-to-moment intensity. The tragedy here is that kids don’t grow up to be like their parents — but don’t grow up differently enough to start with a clean slate. They can make their own mistakes, but they’ll likely make some of their parents’ mistakes as well.
Yale Rep has given the play a handsome production. George Zhou offers the Bartons a clean and comfortable apartment; the Phipps Houses were a breakthrough in affordable urban housing. At the same time, however, Zhou pays tribute to the quick-and-boxy stage designs of the time. Curiously, the wood stove never needs wood, nor is any wood supplied.
Caroline Tyson’s costumes are rigorously period and don’t call attention to themselves. In contrast, Ein Kim’s projections open up a new dimension, making luminous scribbles on key actors as the stage lights fade. It’s as if some giant child, ruminating, were trying to pry open character mysteries with a light pen.
Eden is not an easy play to produce nor a safe choice for the mainstage. Yale Rep and director Brandon J. Dirden deserve kudos for bringing this neglected work to our attention and putting it back onstage where it belongs.