To view our videos, you need to
enable JavaScript. Learn how.
install Adobe Flash 9 or above. Install now.

Then come back here and refresh the page.

Should earnest and lyrical political theater be taken with a spoonful of sugar? Or if a play has serious moral intentions, should it be performed with solemn gravity? The danger of the latter approach, I'm afraid, can be boredom. One case in point is "Things of Dry Hours,"Naomi Wallace's gorgeously-scripted but rather stiff portrait of a communist agitator in the Depression-era South.

As played with intensity, brains and passion by Delroy Lindo, Tice Hogan is a fascinating fictional historical figure: an African-American Marxist who recruits disgruntled wage slaves for the Communist cause.

For conservatives in the audience, treating 1930s Reds with dignity will be a tough pill to swallow but Wallace makes it clear that at the time of Jim Crow, union busting and crushing poverty, revolution was a logical alternative for poor blacks and whites.

But this playwright isn't just sympathizing with radicals, but also crafting a thorny human drama. Hogan's widowed daughter, Cali, portrayed with iron will and wit by Roslyn Ruff, doesn't share his fervor but she's loyal.

This father-daughter domestic calm is broken by the appearance of Corbin Teel, played by Garret Dillahunt, a white trash factory worker who struck down his foreman and needs to hide out. Tice and Cali are suspicious of this ingratiating interloper and the audience should be too.

Wallace sensitively explores the ideological and romantic struggles in this triangulated situation, which, to no surprise, ends badly. There's strong, vibrant acting all around, and the narrative is gripping, but Ruben Santiago-Hudson's staging is overly somber, gray and static. The result is a lack of dramatic momentum that saps the story of suspense or humor.

Wallace is rare as a fiercely political American playwright, and she commands richly poetic and philosophical language. But this too dry staging of a difficult text seems to sleep when, like the workers, it should awaken and fight.