Darker Face Of The Earth, The

Rita Dove, who won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1987, is a gutsy writer who is unafraid to tackle the Oedipus myth, slavery, miscegenation and folk song all in one fell swoop. Working on a big canvas -- an 1820s plantation replete with swamps, cotton fields and nineteen characters -- Dove struggles to bring her impassioned but flawed text under control. She is at her strongest when dealing with African-American speech and song (eight spirituals are sung, movingly, by the plantation slaves), at her weakest in making the Oedipal love affair work in consistently believable fashion. She also tries to juggle too many narrative balls at one time.

The main story concerns Amalia (Jacqueline Schultz) and Louis (William Schenker), the white married couple who run the plantation. Because he drinks and beds down black girls, she takes a black lover herself, Hector (Michael McFall). When she gets pregnant, her doctor (Nathan Legrand, doubling as a cruel field boss) persuades her to give the baby away before the enraged Louis can kill it. It's that bastard child who eventually returns to the plantation as an adult (named Augustus Newcastle) and not only starts stirring up the slaves with his talk of rebellion and freedom but has a passionate love affair with -- you guessed it, his own mom, Amalia. Tragedy results, of course, with Augustus paying a high price for his forbidden desires.

Although this dubious racial melodrama sometimes resembles a sketch from "In Living Color," Dove is lucky to have such a skilled director as Haney, who manages to whip the unwieldy play into shape and coax superior performances out of the entire cast. Edward Haynes' two-level set, Kathi O'Donohue's atmospheric lighting and Naila Aladdin-Sanders' expressive costumes also help make us believe we are back in the ante-bellum south.