Samm-Art Williams was born in Burgaw, North Carolina seventy-eight years ago, and died in that same small rural town last month; he liked to tell people he was “just a country boy.” Actually, though, in between his birth and his death, Williams lived large in the big city – an actor in Hollywood movies,  executive producer of the hit TV series “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” and a playwright who was best-known for “Home,” which was nominated for a Tony Award as Best Play after it transferred from  The Negro Ensemble Company  to Broadway in 1980.  “Home,” a story about a son of the South who not-so-briefly loses his way, is opening tonight on Broadway in a revival directed by Kenny Leon; Williams died four days before its first preview.

If the timing of the production is unfortunate in one way, it’s eye-opening in another. Real-world events have turned what I might have dismissed as a dated fable into what feels like a prescient reappraisal. And the three versatile actors on stage, two of whom portray dozens of characters, make the most of Williams’ evocative language, homespun humor, and a plot that comes close to a morality tale about the Evils of Big City Life versus the righteous simplicity of small-town Southern living. 

Tory Kittles portrays Cephus Miles, a native of Cross Roads, North Carolina, where he spends his childhood fishing and farming, and courting his sweetheart Pattie Mae (Brittany Inge.) But a series of tragedies and disappointments – not least Pattie Mae going away to college and marrying somebody else – makes Cephus feel abandoned by God. Or as he puts it: “I believed in God….I believed in him totally until he took a vacation to the sun-soaked, cool beaches of Miami, while I needed his help and love in the hot sticky tobacco fields of North Carolina.” 

Imprisoned for refusing to serve in the military during the Vietnam War, (“Thou shalt not kill,” he explains), he loses his farm to taxes, can’t find a job because of his prison record, and winds up in a Northern city, turning to drugs and loose women.

I suspect some Broadway theatergoers will be turned off by this dip into melodrama,  or at least find ironic this unmitigated putdown of an entire region of the country (where we happen to live), given that Williams made his name “up North.” It surely won’t help that the last time a Broadway stage was as thick with cornstalks as the current production at Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theater was last year in the musical “Shucked,” which turned the culture of the South into a continuous spritz of gently mocking one-liners.  (A reminder of that show even unintentionally intruded when at one point Cephus exclaimed: “Shucks, Patty Mae.”)

I feel compelled to try a Home defense:

There is enough nuance in the non-North scenes to compensate. Crossing Roads is not a pure fount of morality. As a child, Cephus respects Mrs. Hattie Smith, his Sunday School teacher, and works for her husband John, the local bootlegger. He regularly visits the church graveyard, because that’s the best place to gamble. “The roads were all dirt because the county couldn’t afford to have hard surface highways. The land was black dirt and sand.And in order to get a good roll on the dice, you needed a hard surface.”

At the same time, Cephus’s respect for his hometown is deeply expressed in the language of the play, which often achieves a pleasing poetry: “I love the land, the soft beautiful black sod crushing beneath my feet. A fertile pungent soil. A soil to raise strong children on.”

Cephus makes it back to his hometown, and the play has a really lovely (and deeply improbable) happy ending that I won’t spoil. But one realistic aspect of the happiness is how much the town has changed for the better – and the change Cephus mentions explicitly is in its racial politics (“No more white folks days and colored folks days” at the country fair.)

This brought to mind New York Times columnist Charles Blow’s chronicling of a reversal of the Great Migration, in his 2021 book  “The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto,” and the subsequent 2023 documentary “South to Black Power.” Black Americans are increasingly returning  to the South that their relatives left starting a century ago. They see it as a better way of living, Blow says, but he isn’t just chronicling this movement, he is advocating for it, in order to gain political power.  When a character in “Home” says to Cephus, “It’s no kind of life for a person, outside the Cross Roads. They don’t understand you,” the line Samm-Art Williams wrote more than four decades ago also feels like a kind of advocacy.

Home
Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theater through July 21
Running time: Ninety minutes no intermission
Tickets: $49 – $149
Written by Samm-Art Williams
Directed by Kenny Leon
 Sets by Arnulfo Maldonado, costumes by Dede Ayite, lighting by Allen Lee Hughes, sound by Justin Ellington 
Cast: Tory Kittles as Cephus Miles, Brittany Inge as Pattie Mae Wells and others, and Stori Ayers