In the Blood, Circle Theatre. Director Michael Matthews’s admirable production of Suzan-Lori Parks’s saga of a homeless welfare mother provides a fine opportunity to see just how empty this much praised play really is. Unlike Lisa Portes, who staged it at Next Theatre last February in broad, almost cartoonish strokes, Matthews scales everything back to human size–no mean feat given Parks’s penchant for overstatement. Her protagonist, Hester La Negrita, lives with her five children under a highway underpass. She’s occasionally accosted by a pill-popping, oversexed public-health doctor who insists she be “spayed”; a condescending, oversexed welfare worker who imagines Hester’s greatest need to be a lesson in manners; and a hypocritical, oversexed preacher who sired her youngest child, then vanished. In case you don’t get the point that authority figures fuck over the poor, each is given a dramatically irrelevant monologue to confess his or her sexual tryst with Hester.
