The loft is dark, the audience curiously silent. The sounds of African tribal music slowly resonate louder and louder, and then she appears - a humble-looking black woman scrubbing the floor. A gun is fired. A man drops dead.
The first minute of the play contains more action than the other two-plus hours combined.
Written by Thulani Davis and directed by Ron O.J. Parson, "Everybody's Ruby: The Story of a Murder in Florida" is being presented this season, the 24th of the Ujima Theatre Company, at the TheaterLoft on Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo.
Practically on the stage's lap, the audience can stare at the set before the show and wonder if the scenery is complete.
As the characters make their entrances, the audience awaits something impressive from them. Zora Neale Hurston (Nas Alfi) and Ruby McCollum (Lorna Hill) are two commendable attempts at performing this drawn-out play.
"Everybody's Ruby" centers around two troubled African-American women in 1952, in the town of Live Oak, Fla. On trial for the murder of her husband Sam's (Willie Judson/Hugh Davis) partner, the disagreeable Ruby becomes a local spectacle.
Meanwhile, the boisterous Zora hopes to make Ruby's story into one that will boost her career and possibly even land her a book deal.
The story features little emphasis on present action. Although she is not the title character, Zora is center stage throughout much of the play. The audience sees her rejection from being able to interview, her reactions to disorderly, biased conduct within the courtroom, and the deja-vu style visions of the crime that mystically erupt in her mind.
The story is based on the controversial theme of the relationship between blacks and whites. "They don't put Negroes on jury down here," Zora notes aloud, when the black men strangely decline being part of the jury. Zora is not taken seriously as a journalist. She is denied permission to use the phone and to speak to Ruby, and she does not receive the proper amount for selling her typewriter.
However, most of the hardships the characters face seem more to do with mistakes or bad choices than race. When Zora gives up on the story, she is pushed into obscurity and poverty. This totally contradicts the determined outlook she took so much pride in before.
A praiseworthy performance is given by Dwight E. Simpson, the librarian Logan Beau Shipp, whose naivety is adorable and whose words inspire. William Bradford Huie (played by Timothy Patrick Finnegan) is also a well-acted and noteworthy, leaving the audience with the quote: "Many a man thinks he's making something when he's really just changing things around."
However, it is difficult to understand parts of the play in which some actors portray as many as three roles, such as Jonathan Lee, who plays a powerful mechanic, bartender and black citizen.
As long as audience members are able to remain awake, they can view disputes between spouses and friends, shocking assaults, deceptive affairs, paternity crises, murder threats and suit jackets desperately in need of an update. Finally, when the last vision is enacted, and there is a true portrayal of the crime, Zora says that Ruby was left with "making a choice when none was left."
In the end, Ruby and Zora teach the audience three things we already knew: racists are cruel, the Jim Crow judicial system is corrupt, and "there's no place like home."
The cast and crew however, do an honorable job considering the play they have to work with.
