From the moment Liz Mikel begins belting out “The Hills of Ixopo” in Theatre 3’s Lost in the Stars, the play transfixes its listeners. Lost in the Stars, Maxwell Anderson’s adaptation of Cry, the Beloved Country, tells the story of Absalom, a young man who leaves Ndotsheni, a South African town, to work in the gold mines of Johannesburg. Absalom hasn’t sent word home to his parents in months. Absalom’s father, Stephen, sets out to find him. When Stephen finally gets word of his son, Absalom’s in prison for murdering Edward Jarvis, a white man. Jarvis was the only champion for the blacks in town; yet his father, already a racist, is now confirmed in his bigoted suspicions. The rest of the play involves Stephen’s appeal to Mr. Jarvis’ mercy.

Stephen’s quest, reminiscent of God looking for Adam and Eve after their sin sees them hiding naked and ashamed in the garden, involves the evident biblical analogy with Absalom and David as well. But Stephen’s search isn’t just to find a son; it’s also to forge a nation. Just as David’s kingdom is racked by wars and personal tragedy while Israel works its inheritance out, Absalom’s filial betrayal begins South Africa’s process of national, racial unification.

Jac Alder’s set of columns, chairs, and corrugated tables, with platforms where the singers congregate in apartheid-coded sides, marries shantytown, prison, house, and store in one. This bare-naked space, made radiant at times with blue, green, and yellow lighting, or stark and lifeless when unlit, accentuates the ways space, especially rabidly contested space, alters its performativity based on the color of the speaker.

Cedric Neal, spellbinding in his role as Tommy at the DTC, stars here as Absalom, the renegade son who did not intend to murder. (The truly nefarious character is Matthew (Darius-Anthony Robinson), who coerced Absalom to act and bristles with a Shakespearean kind of evil.) Neal has a lithe, acrobatic grace that allows him to sprint and spring across the stage, endowing him with a physical conduit to work out nausea-inducing emotions.

Terry Vandivort as James Jarvis, Edward’s father, is so skinny he looks skeletal; yet he cries out with all the force of a wounded lion. His Jarvis is capable of great feeling even if he is wrong in many respects. With Akin Babatunde’s rotund, thundering presence as Stephen contrasting with Vandivort’s sleight frame, the tension between these two men couldn’t be clearer. Vandivort and Babatunde’s dynamism creates nail-biting anxiety and irrevocable beauty.

Despite the trauma in its familial story and its national one, Lost in the Stars doesn’t dwell on death. It could easily hover over the corrugated-iron, wiping away all hope, but the bare-floored scenery isn’t meant as a tabula rasa. When Stephen and James reach their hands out across the table, one large black hand and one small white hand embracing each other, the divide that’s held South Africa in thrall loses its stranglehold. What space had been naked and alone becomes communal.

Lost in the Stars
At Theatre 3
May 14 - June 14
www.theatre3dallas.com