Most everyone has a secret they’d rather not air in the public .If you’re a Charleston artist of a certain age, you may or may not want them splashed across the walls of its most venerated Charleston art museum.
In The Ocean We Swim In, the evocative, absorbing new drama by Summerville resident Brad Erickson at PURE Theatre, it appears that a tango with undisclosed truth applies to art critics, too.
Drawing wholly and intricately from its Lowcountry locale to mine universal questions on art and truth, the play is now enjoying its world premiere production directed by PURE’s Sharon Graci. It runs at Cannon Street Arts Center through May 9.
The stakes at the heart of this highly localized Lowcountry work involve a critic, Jack (R.W. Smith), who has been unceremoniously dislodged from a gig in California. He has landed in an historic Summerville home with his partner Dylan (Michael Smallwood), where he aims to see his name in bylines again.
A professional lifeline comes by way of the Rutledge, an esteemed, fictional Charleston arts museum primed for a retrospective of the work of Thomas “Tommy” Manigault Legare (Andrew Puckett). Its curator (Joy Vandervort-Cobb) has tapped Jack to write a piece on the artist for the show’s catalog.
To do so, Jack meets the maker himself, as the 100-year-old local legend is still alive and tippling at a nearby assisted living facility. Steeped in a Southern drawl that’s not quite as Geechee as it might have been, the artist remains agile enough to deflect Jack’s point-blank questions on why his subjects were mainly Black – and whether that is a non-starter in modern-day stances on cultural appropriation.
If Charleston Renaissance bells are ringing, your hearing is sound. In the second act, we time travel from 2021 to 1946, closer to the city’s celebrated era of artistic revival–with the help of voiceovers from the present-day Tommy and character pivots from the performers.
In Pawleys Island, the character Ben, played by Smith, breaks bread with a younger Tommy, along with a luminary guest Dorothy Heyward, played by Vandervort-Cobb, and an actor, Jerry, played by Smallwood. Fresh from the war, and, the young Black performer has been enlisted for their play destined for New York City.
Local culture vultures will know the accomplished Heyward, who was married to DuBose, the author of the novel that was the basis for George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Any critic worth their mettle would get they are rubbing shoulders with yesteryear’s Charleston art world royalty, many of whom in recent years have been hoisted on the petard of their own works.
But back to Jack: While he mulls casting aspersions on Tommy’s problematic oeuvre, his partner Dylan deals with a dalliance with presumed ghosts back at the house, which happens to be the former home of Tommy. Occurrences transpire, including the emergence of never-before-seen paintings that tell an altogether different story of the artist and his life as a gay man.
All of the shrouded mystery is manifest on the production’s spare set via swaths of dark gossamer fabric, falling over their furniture as if they were in a Dickens novel and serving as a metaphorical veil that begs lifting, as the play explicitly articulates, both for the artist and the critic.
Jack’s truth, as it happens, is writ large on the pages of his own journal, which he uses as collateral to coax Tommy’s own. This involves transformative events that have haunted the artist’s life and works, and apparently his former digs, too, concerning deepening connections as a gay man and his bearing witness to the racial hatred roiling in those winsome Pawleys waves.
In that regard, I yearned for more– to not just glean the moment in Tommy’s life he deems its most profound, but to feel it. Solid performances from the three cast members further this, but the tenderness of the then-forbidden desire could go deeper still to establish the imminent tragedy to be more palpable still.
That’s not to say I didn’t feel. For this critic, the subject is tricky, if not triggering, though for the record I have never been cancelled. Still, anyone “disappeared” from a high-profile perch under shrouded circumstances knows the agency of revealing the truth and the murmurs when it is suppressed.
That being said, in today’s high-cancellation times, you don’t have to be an arts critic or an elder artist to register the sting of Jack’s predicament or the spectre of Tommy’s ghosts, or to weigh the agency of separating the artist from the art. And if you relish kicking around the attics of the Lowcountry’s storied cultural past, as I do – not to mention the promise of its continued vitality through our own local storytellers like Erickson – take a swim in this affectingly honest, poignant, homegrown play.
IF YOU WANT TO GO: The Ocean We Swim In runs through May 9 at Cannon Street Arts Center, 134 Cannon St. Tickets range from $15 to $50. More: puretheatre.org
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