As legend has it, blues guitarist Robert Johnson — the “King of the Delta Blues” who died at the age of 27 but whose brief recording career, which included “Sweet Home Chicago,” laid the groundwork for future rock and roll — made a deal with the devil for his soul.
It’s a familiar frame — the Faustian bargain — embedded deeply into our mythmaking about human choices and ambition.
But what about the decisions of the demon figure?
In Ngozi Anyanwu’s richly poetic but overly cool-to-the-touch new play “Leroy and Lucy,” impeccably acted by Jon Michael Hill and Brittany Bradford in its world premiere at Steppenwolf Theatre, a decidedly unsatanic devil gets her due, becoming a sympathetic, complex character in her own right, battling against being forgotten and alone.
Anyanwu makes no effort to give this work a realistic hue. We’re told we’re not far from Clarkdale, Mississippi, the so-called home of the blues; but from the start, we exist in a fable-like otherworldliness — a shrouded-in-darkness “crossroads” imagined in a tree-toned puzzle-like stage from designer Andrew Boyce.
From the context and the costumes by Yvonne L. Miranda we can guess we’re in the 1930s. A woman strums the guitar and sings. A man arrives, carrying a rickety homemade instrument of his own, asking if she’s OK.
They talk. He’s named Leroy, although he later lets us know he’s otherwise known as Bobby Johnson (Leroy was the guitarist’s middle name). She introduces herself as Lucy, but ultimately admits to going by many, many names. He’s polite, mostly modest, a touch insecure, and quickly smitten. She’s mysterious, playful, confident and seductive.
He’s on his way to Memphis, escaping from the death of a wife and child to a future unknown in a place of musical opportunity. She’s also alone, and Anyanwu’s writing shines as Lucy reveals a clever history that brings us quickly into the underlying game — she’s been kicked out of her father’s house for, as she tells us, “sinning.”
To the great credit of Hill and Bradford and director Awoye Timpo, this feeling-out sequence is among the most entertaining of the evening, evolving from uneasiness into rapport with intriguing humor and lyrical innuendo, and short spurts of music.
But the middle part of the 90-minute “Leroy and Lucy” falters. It’s still lyrical, and the actors here are always compelling to watch. But the storytelling lags; the narrative treads water. Robert Johnson’s backstory, his demons if you will, feel perfunctory, his deep connection to music and unstoppable urge to greatness under-developed. The musical interludes are brief and mostly hesitant rather than virtuosic. The intrigue between them feels overly stretched out.
“Leroy and Lucy” recovers when our attention turns more fully to Lucy, if we want to continue to call her that. Beginning early on, we’re asked to question whether our typical understanding of myths, and mythmaking, simply reflect a misunderstanding of the heavens, a Christianized and male-oriented world view where temptation to greatness has a Satanic bent. But what if that serves as an oppressive notion, as a means of suggesting to the less powerful that aspiring to the god-like is wrong?
This comes fully alive in a twist that displays the virtuosity of the acting and the excellence of Connor Wang’s sound design. The characters transform, and Anyanwu’s angle on this myth becomes clear — based on figures from Nigerian Igbo mythology — fascinating but unfamiliar to me, and a bit challenging to process without some research. But what is immediately clear is we are in the realm of deities who express dissatisfaction with their lack of current popularity or misinterpretation, which certainly enlivens the play anew.
Anyanwu asks us to reconsider the way we think about the relationship between gods — or the spirt-world, or the universe — and humans, and argues for aspiring to the God within us. It’s moving for a moment or two, as is a brief contemporary coda, but it also feels heady and insufficiently incorporated into the Robert Johnson narrative throughout.
“Leroy and Lucy” is a smart and eventually provocative work, but inconsistently involving. And in terms of emotion, even in the end, I felt the grays, maybe deepening into the purples.
But I never felt the blues.