HOODOO LOVE a Fabulous Debut for Chicago's Collective Theatre

Chicago's Collective Theatre, a new company created by six friends* who attended Thornridge High School in the 90s, has made an amazing debut with a beautifully composed, aggressively staged production of Katori Hall's Hoodoo Love.

It's not easy for a brand-new company to find its footing the first time out, which makes this production, directed by Nelsan Ellis, one of the founders of the Collective Theatre as well as one of the stars of HBO's True Blood, all the more remarkable. The drama, the performances and the production values are right where they should be, indicating that the Collective Theatre knows what it's doing and where it's headed.

Hoodoo Love is playing inside a small performance space at the Atheneum Theatre on Chicago's north side, with a cast of ten and a detailed, atmospheric set that packs a whole lot of punch in such intimate surroundings. Ellis's direction is sure and sharply focused, with vivid stage pictures that showcase just how good his actors are.

Hall's script doesn't take the easy route, either, with poetic, powerful storytelling centered on a desperate young woman living in a shack somewhere around Memphis. Toulou does domestic work washing clothes, but she wants to sing the blues on Beale Street. She also wants to own the heart of a rambling blues man named Ace of Spades who has a girl in every town the train stops. It's her desire to capture his heart and keep it forever that fuels the play's darkest moments, when Toulou turns to the neighbor conjure-woman, Candy Lady, to make her dreams come true.

For one brief moment, it's all right there. And then, just as quickly, things go very wrong.

It's a mesmerizing story, even as you know in your heart this isn't going to end well. And when Hall's plot takes its ugly twists and turns, there's a can't-look-away quality in the fierce performances of Lynn Wactor as Toulou and LaRoyce Hawkins as Ace of Spades, and in the stylings of Opal Demetria Staples, who takes on the role of a stylish blues singer named Lillie Mae whose songs comment on and shade the action. Staples is just plain fabulous. Her presence is one of the changes Ellis made to the Hoodoo tableau, and it couldn't be a better fit.

There is a lot of music here, most of it indicated in Hall's script, but all of it makes this production of Hoodoo Love rise above. Every performer on stage -- Wactor, Hawkins and Staples, along with Tony Lynice Fountain as Candy Lady, Mark Smith as Toulou's evil brother Jib, Greg Williams and Mark J.P. Hood as Lillie Mae's back-ups, and Leon Q. Allen, Giles Corey and Thomas Lowey as a blues trio tucked into the corner -- sells the blues and deepens the drama.

The Collective Theatre's HooDoo Love is an auspicious debut for a company we can only hope to see more of. "Stay with us, we're going somewhere" is the company motto. I'm thinking they're already there.

Performances continue through October 21 at the Atheneum. For details and information, you can visit the Collective Theatre Company Facebook page.

* The Collective Theatre founders are Francois Battiste, Veronda G. Carey, Le'Mil Eiland, Nelsan Ellis, Metra Gilliard and Jasond Jones.

Six Friends Launch HOODOO LOVE for Chicago's Collective Theatre Company

One of the best things about the Masters program at Illinois State University that I am currently involved with has been meeting people like Le'Mil Eiland. There's no two ways about it: Le'Mil is awesome.

He's also one of six theatrically inclined friends who attended Thornridge High School in the late 90s who've gotten back together to form a new theatre company in Chicago. It's called the Collective Theatre, and its very first show opened last night at the Athenaeum Theatre on Southport Avenue in Chicago.

That show is Katori Hall's Hoodoo Love, a heady concoction of dreams, superstition, love, jealousy, deception and singing the blues. It's set in Memphis in the 1930s, where a woman named Toulou yearns to be a singer in a jukejoint just off Beale Street. Toulou dreams not only of musical fame, but of catching the eye of Ace of Spades, a blues man with a wandering soul. She's so desperate to have him that she goes to her friendly neighborhood hoodoo woman to get a love spell.

The spell works, but it's one of those "Be careful what you wish for" scenarios, realizing Toulou's dreams in a way she could never have imagined. The music of desperation and desire is woven throughout Hoodoo Love.

Nelsan Ellis, one of the six founding members of the Collective Theatre Company as well as star of HBO's True Blood, directs a cast that includes Lynn Wactor as Toulou; Toni Lynice Fountain as Candy Lady, the hoodoo woman; LaRoyce Hawkins as Ace of Spades, and Mark Smith as Jib, Toulou's double-dealing brother. This production of Hoodoo Love runs through October 21, with tickets available here or by calling 773-935-6875.

Aside from all going to Thornridge, Le'Mil Eiland and the other five founders of the Collective Theatre Company all participated in speech and theatre. Eiland, Ellis, Broadway veteran Francois Battiste, Chicago actress and teacher Veronda G. Carey, marketing and promotions manager Metra Gilliard and metallurgist and engineer Jasond Jones were all state champions, too, which is no mean feat.

As it happens, I have vivid memories of The People Could Fly, the "performance in the round" that won Le'Mil a state championship in 1998. It was a stunning little show, one that showed just how good "performance in the round" can be.

Eiland also competed in Drama and Oratory at the state level. As for the others... Battiste was half of a Dramatic Duet Acting team that won state in 1994, while Carey and Gilliard won as a duo in that same event in 1995, Jones took the state trophy home in Group Interp for The Colored Museum, and Ellis was a state champion in Oratorical Declamation in 1997.