ELVIRA AND THE LOST PRINCE
Poor Elvira–fired from her $60,000-a-year job as a corporate attorney, facing disbarment, accused of embezzlement by the press, harassed by the mob, and all because she stonewalled on a plan to build a shopping center on land where slaves were buried. But little does the feisty young woman realize, slouching about her house and drowning her sorrows in cheap champagne, that her fortunes are about to change: the handsome, eloquent young man with one crippled foot who appears suddenly at her window is none other than Eshu, the priapal trickster of Yoruba folklore, who’s fallen head over phallus in love with her. Seeing great potential in Elvira’s reverence for her ancestors, feral sensuality, and love of tricks–she is a lawyer, after all–Eshu intends to petition his divine family of Orishas to make her one of them so that he can marry her. This notion infuriates the vain and jealous Oshun, who vows to use her feminine wiles to block their union. And the meddling of gods being rather messy, the lovers suffer many tests at the hands of spiteful adversaries.
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Most playwrights take up the Plight of the Homeless with more zeal than craftsmanship, often sacrificing drama to didacticism. Margaret Smith Lowery, however, has written a straightforward, well-plotted tale of love and spiritual growth in two whole and believable human beings, allowing larger questions to arise naturally from the central action. Are the light-fingered pickpocket and the bureaucrat who robs halfway-house residents any better than those they exploit, and isn’t their fear of becoming like their victims understandable in these uncertain times? Sam and Jack, the security guards who are supposed to roust out the vagrants, and Zena, Sally’s former coworker, are perhaps justifiably reluctant to endanger their own positions by being too sympathetic. And perhaps Sally’s stubbornness and Eddie’s despair were instrumental in bringing them to their present situations. Lowery points no fingers–instead she allows her characters to speak for themselves, and her audiences to draw their own conclusions.
