The play “Oak” at Edgewater’s Raven Theatre has a beautiful moment when all of the house lights are cut. Just as the crowd starts to stir, the black-out darkness is pierced by the 1980s New Edition hit “Can You Stand The Rain.” As Johnny Gill starts that iconic first verse, a palpable wave moves across the room, and most of the audience sings along.
This is the atmosphere that playwright Terry Guest carefully curates in “Oak,” currently having its Chicago premiere at Raven. As a writer, Guest always offers sweet with savory and knows when to incorporate music at just the right time in combination with director Mikael Burke, his frequent collaborator, who has learned how to bring Guest’s vision to the stage with flair.
“Oak” is a Southern Gothic ghost story set in a small town in rural Georgia, where a mysterious creek monster has been snatching kids for generations. Underneath the drama of kids going missing and trying to escape the doomed fate, Guest delivers commentary on childhood trauma, race and what it’s like to be Black and stuck in a perpetual cycle of poverty. When a Black girl goes missing in this fictional town, is there a disproportionate rescue response compared to a white girl? You bet there is, just like in real life.
Guest deftly wraps these themes around the story of Odella the Creek Monster, oftentimes lulling the audience into comfort with familiar R&B cuts, tenderness between siblings and playing on nostalgia for the simpler times of spending summer days with cousins.
Then the rug is abruptly pulled from beneath the viewer’s feet and a child is abducted or a dark traumatic secret is revealed. It’s stunning. And a constant reminder that even though this show is fun, it has a lot to say.
Still, in a play that includes a creepy, shotgun wielding old woman and a mysterious monster, the scariest thing is the narrative that some children aren’t allowed to have childhoods. In this world, there’s a “snatchin’ season” that lasts until the end of July, during which kids have a sharp 7 p.m. curfew because so many disappear.
The danger doesn’t stop there. In a powerful performance by Brianna Buckley, who plays Peaches, the audience meets a mother who has made the ultimate sacrifice for her children. She became a mother at 16 and has dreams of moving to California, but is stuck working at a fast food joint in her hometown.
In her exchanges with her daughter Pickle, played by Jazzy Rush, it’s clear that she is carrying so much pain from her own life that she struggles to provide the compassion her daughter desperately needs. Together, these two actors have breathtaking scenes that explore traumatic experiences. They fail to see eye to eye, evoking so much emotion that at one point, it almost seems the tears of scenemate Donovan Session, who plays Pickle’s little brother Big Man, could be real.
Session nails the role of a 9-year-old boy. He offers just the right amount of annoyance and curiosity, and so many times in the show he elicits vocal laughter from the audience with just movements or facial expressions.
Burke, at the helm, makes full use of the set designed by Sydney Lynne Thomas. An old television, incorporated into the stage, displays clips from local news with updates on “snatchin’ season.” In some metatheatrical scenes, characters are alone on stage in the dark telling ghost stories, some real and some urban legend, lit by a single handheld flashlight as if campfire style. And, as we’ve seen in the previous work of Guest and Burke, there’s also puppetry.
“Oak” walks a razor’s edge between horror and comedy while carefully maintaining a core message with sharp commentary on race. If the film “Get Out” was a play, it would feel similar to what Guest and Burke have crafted here. The production is steeped in Black culture, from the music to the wardrobes, and in the end, even with a monster terrorizing the town, the biggest threat to the characters at its heart is growing up Black in America.
Mike Davis is WBEZ’s theater reporter.