Theater review | "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears" is touching immigrant saga

Theater Review |

The wary, alert eyes. The slumped shoulders. The quiet isolation, and muted surprise when being touched, flirted with, desired, needed.

All are captured in Sylvester Foday Kamara's beautifully understated yet penetrating performance as Sepha Stephanos, an Ethiopian refugee who is the central character in the novel "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears" and Book-It Repertory Theatre's new dramatization of it.

This is one of those performances that conveys much more nonverbally than in words. And it is what anchors Book-It's respectful but sometimes awkward adaptation of Dinaw Mengestu's subtle, heartbreaking study of the sadder flip-side of the immigrant American dream.

As Kamara emanates, Sepha is a kind of sleepwalker. Since fleeing the political turmoil and violence in his native country as an adolescent, he has sunken into a state of self-imposed, depressive isolation.

He is so indifferent to the running of his small grocery store, in a poor black quarter of Washington, D.C., that he keeps erratic hours there.

And his only real friends, Kenneth (Reginald Andre Jackson) and Joseph (Earl Alexander), are fellow African immigrants, who get drunk with him once a week, play a gallows-humor game of name-that-African-dictator and try to stir Sepha out of his torpor.

What brings Sepha alive, by small flickers, is his fragile connection to a new white neighbor, Judith (the fine-tuned Myra Platt) and her quirky, mixed-race daughter, Naomi (the adolescent charmer Olachi Anamelechi).

But as in life, more often than make-believe, such relations are complex. Culture, class and race complicate any romance with the lovely Judith.

And Sepha is so invisibly traumatized by loss and survivors' guilt, how can he trust any form of intimacy?

Adapter Kevin McKeon, director Jane Jones and the cast, particularly Kamara and Platt, tread carefully here to maintain the emotional temperature of Mengestu's graceful book and its sardonic and lyrical prose.

But converting a tale that's essentially an interior rumination into a play is not easy in this instance.

The time scheme gets blurry, as Sepha's point of view shifts between 2000, 1999 and earlier times. The pacing can plod, with day-to-day detailing. And an extended sequence where Sepha follows a tourist couple reads in the novel more affectingly and symbolically than it plays onstage.

Yet if the script is ungainly, "The Beautiful Things Heaven Bears" (with its title from a telling Dante quote) can be very moving. It's most poignant as Sepha tries to reach out of his comfort zone to make genuine contact with the flirtatious but in-flux Judith, despite the cultural differences, mixed signals and unfortunate timing.

Also touching are moments when Sepha draws closer to Naomi, who becomes a kind of surrogate daughter for this man without a country, a wife or children of his own.

The flashback to the tragedy largely responsible for the psychic burden Sepha is carrying on those sagging shoulders is a well-staged punch in the gut.

But it is Kamara (who hails originally from Sierra Leone) who carries "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears." It's his wistful intelligence and dignity that make this immigrant saga so bittersweet.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com