A stark 'Dry Hours' examines friendship, betrayal

Such ingredients make poet-turned-playwright Naomi Wallace's eloquent "Things of Dry Hours" a stark, complex drama filled with rich imagery and laced with dark humor.

In 1932 Depression-ravaged Birmingham, Ala., the only thing worse to the police than black men without jobs who dare to demonstrate in public are the members of the racially mixed, forbidden Communist Party.

Enter Tice Hogan, superbly played by Delroy Lindo. An unemployed former steel worker, Hogan is also a preacher and, secretly, unit leader and recruiter in the local Communist Party chapter.

Widower Tice lives with his reserved, hardheaded daughter Cali (Roslyn Ruff), an apolitical young widow who washes laundry for wealthy white people.

The two have a fond relationship, gently teasing one another about their lack of love lives. Ruff gradually reveals deeper layers of Cali's personality through the way Cali deals with her father and with the unwanted advances of some of her employers. When Tice quotes from the Bible or the Communist Manifesto to cleverly make his points, Cali holds her own with humorous logic and reason.

Into their simple home comes a young white man, Corbin Teel (Garret Dillahunt), an indigent fugitive who claims he was recently fired from the steel foundry where Hogan worked. He insists he must hide with the Hogans because he killed a foreman, threatening to expose Tice's Communist activities unless he's allowed to stay. Knowing the dangers that lurk outside for all of them, Tice reluctantly agrees to shelter Teel.

The shifting relationships between these three are skillfully directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, as the personal and political tension escalates.

Dillahunt is compelling as the disheveled Teel, whose true motives and loyalties are unclear. Though he is likable in many ways, his shifty behavior does not inspire trust in either of the Hogans.

Inevitably, Teel is the catalyst for some explosive violence, as Tice's hope to eventually create better conditions for all workers conflicts with the brutal, repressive time and place where he lives.

"Things of Dry Hours" is running at the off-Broadway's New York Theatre Workshop through June 28.