Review: Two Cousins Find Hope in Each Other Despite Their Differences in Furlough’s Paradise

The West Coast premiere of A.K. Payne’s Furlough’s Paradise is a poignant exploration of familial bonds that keep people together even when they feel they have nothing in common. Combining dialogue, dance, and poetry, the play pierces the heart.

When first cousins Mina (Kacie Rogers) and Sade (DeWanda Wise) return from Sade’s mother’s funeral, they appear to have no love for each other. Ivy Leaguer Mina, whose father passed away, was responsible for putting her father’s twin sister’s funeral together alone since Sade has been in prison and has just been released for a three-day furlough. Sade, who still has seven years left to serve, resents Mina’s empowering upbringing. But though financially successful, Mina suffers her own pain, and after the she and Sade clash, it becomes clear that they need each other to be whole.

Payne’s lyrical language makes the characters’ monologues feel like arias. The author allows the characters to openly state their rage, but it’s the little moments—a purchase of Cookie Crisp cereal, an invitation to a fantastical utopia—that reveal the deep love Mina and Sade have for each other, even before they’re ready to admit it.

Audiences accustomed to more conventional storytelling will need to be patient; the plot can be tough to follow at times and Payne gives only limited information about the characters. Sade’s crimes are hinted at, and the subject of paradise as a metaphor for freedom seeps into the tale, but Paradise here is a person, a title character who’s rarely talked about and who’s fate appears inconsequential. Still, the performances are stirring and convey things that are left unsaid: Wise evokes both the hostility and resolution to her life’s path. Rogers conjures a mothering sensibility in her character’s relationship with the troubled cousin.

Director Tinashe Kajese-Bolden and choreographer Dell Howlett tell some of the story through modern dance to reflect the characters’ agony, loneliness, and sense of family connection. Celeste Jennings’s costumes show the economic differences between the women as well as Sade’s acclimation to prison clothes. Chika Shimizu’s set, with a frosted-glass shower, a small TV, a sparce kitchen, and inexpensive furniture, seems appropriate for Mina’s second home —there’s no actual life in it. Pablo Santiago’s impressionistic lighting represents both characters’ literal and figurative prison walls.

The heavily armored characters in Furlough’s Paradise are on vastly different journeys, but the joy they eventually find in each other, despite the chains that bind them to their present life, provides us with a much-needed message of hope.