‘Blue Vein Society’ and ‘Sweat’ are two books turned plays that should have stayed on the page.

Director Samuel L. Kelley adapted ‘Blue Vein Society,’ a one-act play, from the short story ‘The Wife of His Youth’ by Charles Chesnutt.

‘Blue Vein Society’ shared the stage with ‘Sweat,’ a play George C. Wolfe adapted from a short story by Zora Neale Hurston. The two one-act plays came together to form a night of African-American literature turned theater at the Paul Robeson Performing Arts Co. on Saturday.

Unfortunately, good acting and strong chemistry drowned in an excess of words.

In ‘Blue Vein Society,’ the United States is divided into two sects. On one side are free slaves and light-skinned blacks who were able to escape their dangerous pasts and rebuild their lives. On the other side, there are the slaves who recently found freedom alongside darker-skinned blacks who couldn’t seem to get off their feet due to their skin tone.

Josh Ryder, the main character of the play, was happy with the way his life was going. He found a new life with his fair-skinned, college-educated wife in Ohio. He was about to gain the highest honor of being named president of the Groveland Social Society. Right at the height of his success, an old slave woman wandered into town looking for him, bringing back old memories of a past Ryder had been trying to forget.

Graduate student Ryan Travis, who played Ryder, was believable as a man torn between two worlds. At the beginning of the play, Travis’s too-precise grammar and large vocabulary perfectly demonstrated Ryder’s phoniness trying to appear from the upper class. His depiction of Ryder mirrored Damon Waynes’ playing Rafael Delacroix in Spike Lee’s ‘Bamboozled.’

Annette Adams-Brown, of Syracuse, perfectly executed the role of Liza, the slave woman who ventured north after the war to look for her long-lost love, Samuel Taylor. From her poor-woman’s clothes and head wrap to the pained look of years of struggling on her face, Brown did a perfect job bringing the audience along on her journeys.

The chemistry between Brown and Travis made the play; their body language was more telling than the dialogue. In a story driven by dialogue – which at times was a little hard to follow – the interaction between characters was key.

While Brown and Travis worked well to create a heart-wrenching love story, the characters of Ryder and Molly (Ryder’s fiancée) seemed lacking. This relationship was the opposite of Ryder and Liza, because the audience had to pay more attention to the dialogue to know what was going on between the characters. Their love seemed more businesslike than anything else. The contrast between the two couples ends up being significant to the main plot.

Although those aspects of the set were good, they couldn’t completely redeem the wordiness that clouded the start of the play. The passion of the first half of their show couldn’t make its way through the mulling dialogue. The reliance on dialogue asked a lot of concentration from the audience. At times there was simply too much dialogue, causing the whole play to drag on.

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‘Sweat,’ though wordy, was all about body movements and facial expressions. Director and senior acting and political science major James Miller expressed ‘Sweat’ through synchronized body movements.

‘Sweat’ tells the story of a battered wife, Delia Jones (junior Lauren Krystal Waters) who decides to stand up for herself against her unfaithful and violent husband, Sykes (graduate student Ryan Travis).

Travis plays the unlikable and seemingly thuggish Sykes perfectly. He lets everything speak for itself, from his body movements and walk to his facial expressions.

Waters’ often complacent but suffering facial expressions personified a woman at wits’ end with her marriage but afraid to stand up for herself. Her tolerant attitude is frustrating when one wants to see her give Sykes what he deserved at the beginning of the play.

Although there were only three main characters, a cast of 10 played the townspeople. The large cast often echoed key words like ‘sweat’ and ‘blood,’ which added to the play’s small-town feel. The narration by various characters kept the audience engaged.

This play surpassed ‘Blue Vein Society’ because the cast spoke directly to the audience rather than each other. Rather than pushing each other in certain scenes, characters pushed against the air toward the audience.

The spiritual songs the cast sang added to the triumphant feel of the story. Also, the way the entire cast moved along with the main characters livened up the story and made the audience feel like more than spectators.

While this one-act play was more engaging, that aspect sometimes took over, making it rely too much on the body movement. Inevitably, that made the show harder to follow.

Published on October 12, 2008 at 12:00 pm