Cephus Miles, the sweet-natured, simple hero of Samm-Art Williams' Home, is an African-American farmer who loves his land of hot, sticky tobacco fields in Cross Roads, N.C. He just wants to marry his girlfriend Pattie Mae and stay there always. But fate propels him into prison when, as a Vietnam War draftee, he refuses to kill because he cannot go against his Biblical teachings to "love thy neighbor." His odyssey takes him to a big city where he finds work loading trucks at a shirt factory but is fired when his employer learns he is an ex-convict. Through drink, drugs and loose women he ends up homeless and forsaken. Author Williams, alas, is compelled to cobble a happy, unbelievable O. Henry ending for his tale. Though he loses his farm for unpaid taxes while in prison, Cephus suddenly hears from his Aunt Hannah that a mysterious benefactor has bought the farm and deeded it to Cephus. He's clueless about all that. But, as the audience knows, who else would do this but old girlfriend Pattie Mae, now divorced after two miscarriages, back home in Cross Roads, and still in love with Cephus?
Changes improving Southern black life that have taken place in the 13 years Cephus has been away (colored restrooms abolished, a Greyhound bus with a black driver) are alluded to in gee-whiz, Pollyannaish fashion, as if all racial problems were now and forever solved. Home, first produced in 1979, has its affecting moments but is so overburdened with stereotypes that its message is fatally diluted.
Three superb actors play all the parts: Bryan Hicks is a dignified, likable Cephus, and two women -- Opal Aladdin, primarily as Pattie Mae, and Linda Sithole -- portray a variety of characters.
