The young poet-playwright Inua Ellams’s The Half-God of Rainfall is a compelling throwback of a show, a blend of ancient Greek and Yoruba mythology written in verse, a loose iambic sexameter with rhymes (and half-rhymes) delivered every other line as a kind of morsel of ambrosia along the journey. It’s an ambitious endeavor that works surprisingly well as theater, as well as a text to be read and admired, thanks to director Taibi Magar’s lavish physical production at New York Theatre Workshop. (The show opened Monday night.)
Our hero is Demi (Mister Fitzgerald), a modern-day basketball star whose supernatural gifts on the court owe much to his status as the half-mortal son of Zeus (Michael Laurence), who raped his mortal Nigerian mother, Modúpé (Jennifer Mogbrock). Even before learning of his violent origin story, Demi is a powerful but sensitive young man, whose occasional crying jags cause rivers to overflow and mass flooding.
But when the powers that be ban demigods like him from mortal sports, he sets out to avenge his deadbeat dad — with the help of the Yoruba thunder god, Sàngó (Jason Bowen), the river goddess Osun (Patrice Johnson Chevannes), the god of order Elegba (Lizan Mitchell) and even Zeus’s wife, Hera (Kelley Curran).
The story, narrated by much of the cast in turn, has a quality that is both heightened and colloquial in Ellams’s verse style. There are spoken chapter headings to introduce new sections, as well as aphoristic lines like “his vengeance needed greatness” and poetic turns of phrase (as locker rooms become “a mess of ice packs, drowned towels, frustration and regret”). But just as suddenly, the language can turn more familiar, with the “Swish” of a sunk basket or Demi’s shouted denunciation, “Fuck Zeus.”
What truly elevates the material is the first-rate production design. Riccardo Hernández’s deceptively simple set, with a dirt floor and scrims surround three sides of the stage, is amplified by Tal Yarden’s projections as well as Stacey Derosier’s expressive lighting piercing through spaces that are often nearly pitch-black, or enveloped in smoke, or soaked with an overhead shower of water. Linda Cho’s costumes suggest a pantheon of divinities, with robes and trains transforming into stage-size cloths that can imitate oceans or clouds as needed. And Beatrice Capote has contributed choreography that mimics everything from orisha rituals to basketball moves to battle scenes.
The Half-God of Rainfall is a work of modern theater-making that hearkens back to ancient forms of storytelling. It starts with a story, with a voice, but is made richer by the other arts and skills that can enhance a purely oral tradition. There’s no doubt that Ellams possesses a singular voice, has a rich, multilayered story to tell — and that the first-rate stagecraft here amplifies his achievement.
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