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Cicada

Presented by Voices of the South at TheatreWorks

August 21-September 6, 2009

Avg. Event Rating (4.5 Stars):
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Cicada is a new play written by Voices of the South artistic director, Jerre Dye. Set in rural Mississippi, this coming of age ghost story is deeply rooted in the life of a small southern family on the verge of transformation. The unrelenting July heat presses in on seventeen-year-old Ace and his mother Lily as they dig their way out the past. It's a story about letting go and shedding what is no longer necessary in a world full of secrets, ghosts, and memories that hold on tight. Poetic, dynamic, lyrical and hard-hitting, this unique piece of theater sheds light on the enduring southern spirit by exploring the complexity of the ties that bind.

ArtsMemphis Rants & Ravers Theatre Preview by David Prete:

In Voices of the South’s new theater/office space, Jerre Dye (Artistic Director) pulls his leg out from under the table and shows me the tattoo on his right shin of a cicada. “I got this when I was twenty-four,” he says. To him cicadas represent the transformations humans go through in life and actors go through playing different parts. Cicadas also sang in the background throughout his southern upbringing. So it’s no surprise that he named his play after these insects, which opens August, 21 at TheaterWorks.
“Cicadas have a fascinating life cycle,” says Dye, considering his tattoo. “They hatch from tree-laid eggs and gestate in the ground for up to seventeen years.” The insects’ gestation period is comparable to that of Dye’s play: Ten years ago he started writing monologues in the voices of the play’s main characters, but they didn’t see the light of day until VOTS company members goaded him to turn the monologues into a complete work. In those ten years, the play has solidified into what Dye calls “a coming of age ghost story.”
Ace, the play’s main character and narrator, is coming of age in a haunted house. Ghosts manipulate his reality by moving people and objects, and creating sounds and music in a style director Leslie Barker calls “almost natural.” The ghosts also support Ace’s plight to understand and ultimately let go of his father who left Ace alone to play man of the house to his mother. While writing the play Dye spent a lot of time talking to people about ghosts and found most people believe they exist in some form or another. “We need ghosts to comfort us,” says Dye, “to advise and push us.”
Cicada’s ghosts are there to help the characters let go of their pasts—if they want to. “The characters are trying to let go of wrong perceptions they have of themselves,” says, Dye. “They are also trying to let go of people they don’t need anymore, but think they do.” They play speaks to the difficulty of both those ventures. “We think of letting go as a graceful thing,” says Barker, “but actually it’s kind of fierce.”
Ten years since its conception, Cicada is finally past the gestation period and on its way toward maturation. But it can’t get there without theatrical lights and an audience. It may not be a well known fact that playwrights cannot finish writing a play without seeing it performed before an audience, but it’s inherent to the process. So we’ll be contributing to the writing process by virtue of our presence in the theater.
Still looking down at his shin, Dye tells me that after a cicada’s long gestation period in the ground, it climbs back up the same tree in which its egg was laid. Then through the influence of something inexplicable—nature, perhaps its ancestors—it cracks out of its husk, wings-first, into the light of day. And immediately sings. 

Photo by Amanda Hill - "Ghosts of Cicada." L to R: Ashley Clyburn, Susan Chrietzberg, Elaine Blanchard, Ondine Geary, Virginia Ralph Matthews.

ArtsMemphis Rants & Ravers Theatre Review by Billy Pullen

Christ-haunted with references such as the “Crucifixion is a beautiful thing” and “I love you like Jesus opened his arms and died,” and Southern clichés such as a mother hanging herself in the closest and an “Aunt Sis” who drops dead in her Cream of Wheat, Cicada, a new play by Voices of the South Artistic Director Jerre Dye, contains elements of a memory play, narrative theatre, and the Greek chorus.
All of these rudiments blend intermittently in a story of the human spirit’s unwillingness to forget and move on.
Lily (Alice Berry) broods over a long-lost love who got her pregnant, skipped town, and sent her a post-card that she received when the infant Ace was only three days old. Lily’s house is full of ghosts and secrets, one of which the grown Ace (Adam Maldonado) finds in the attic. In the meantime neighbor LaNora (Cecelia) who’s “too damn mean to go to hell” sees the ghost of husband Preacher (Steve Swift) as she fights an interminable nemesis, a mimosa tree that’s responsible for the “pink puff-ball bastards” which are dominating her yard.
Both Lily and LaNora love their men vehemently, but they cope with their losses differently. Lily drinks bourbon (disguised as decaffeinated coffee) and yells at son Ace to love Jesus while LaNora curses and spouts advice about the woes of modern air conditioning and the wisdom of the Eskimos who know how to handle old, dying people. After an eighty-minute journey of trying to let go of the past and thus, the ghosts of both house, these two women finally meet in a poignant scene where they experience an epiphany.
With Ace serving as the primary narrator, the play is served ambivalently with the use of narrative theatre. Others join in the narration, and sometimes characters speak in both first person and third person. This inconsistency is a slight distraction, but the visual images of the chorus in silhouette behind and other choreographic moments of childbirth compensate for any malfunctions. Their lyrical movement would make even Martha Graham proud. Essentially a one-act play, Cicada has that old Southern theme of clinging to the past, a wayward man that creates havoc in the lives of women, religion, and booze. The memory play aspect evokes pieces of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie with a man who falls in love with long distance, a woman who clings to the past, the use of poetic language, and the image of two lonely women blowing a solitary candle in the final scene.
Playwright Jerre Dye inherently faces the challenge of avoiding clichés and certain aspects of Southern Gothic genre. He might even ask himself whose play is this? Is it the story of Alice? Ace? What character and what action drive the story? Is the story inherently theatrical? Dye does tell a good story and he is blessed with a talented cast and a perceptive director, Leslie Barker, who seems to grasp the writer’s vision. Alice Berry as the wronged Lily avoids caricature and wins empathy for a woman who lives in the past with a houseful of ghosts. Cecelia Wingate as LaNora wins laughs in her rants, but also wins pathos in the last scene with Lily, and in most of the scenes with her ghost husband, but the fart-finger routine needs to go.