Review: In “Flyin’ West,” four Black women hold fast to their chunk of Kansas prairie

Just how vulnerable the pursuit of happiness could be for Blacks during Reconstruction is on aching and wry display in Pearl Cleage’s “Flyin’ West.” So, too, is the tenacity of the liberated.

The play, a welcome collaboration between Firehouse Theater and Aurora’s 5280 Artist Co-Op, is getting an engaging production at the John Hand Theater through May 7.

At the outset of the play, a bundled figure toting a rifle and wearing a brimmed hat and heavy coat strides into a compact homestead on the outskirts of Nicodemus, Kan. That powerful person turns out to be Sophie (Adrienne Martin-Fullwood). Sophie, along with Miss Leah (Latifah Johnson) and Fannie (Kenya Fashaw), have settled a broad swath of land on the outskirts of Nicodemus, due in part to the Homestead Act.

There is a lot of beauty in this drama — directed by donnie l. betts — and no small measure of trauma. Fannie and Sophie’s youngest sister, Minnie (YasmineEmani Hunter), arrives by train with husband Frank (Abid Hassan) wearing a hat tilted to cover her bruised face.

That she’s been struck riles her sisters and Miss Leah. That Frank is the sort of man who would commit that act and exert control over Minnie makes the fact that Sophie plans on handing Minnie a deed to a third of the land makes for a surprisingly effective cliffhanger. Will Frank somehow purloin Minnie’s deed? Will he sell her portion of the land to a cadre of “white gentlemen” he made friends with on the train? Will Minnie see the light and stand up to him? And why’s he so dang evil?

“Flyin’ West” pits two biracial characters — or, in the parlance of the time and the play, “mulattos” — against each other. Literally and figuratively, Sophie and Frank are nemeses, to be sure.

Frank may have his reasons for being so bitter, so dark — chiefly, his being so light — but his smarminess and violence quickly put an end to audience empathy. He’s a villain in the twirl-of-mustache sense; the root of his moral affliction is his status as a bastard son of a white enslaver.

The 1995 play tangles with colorism in ways that remain compelling but also feel shaped by the racial identity quandaries circa its original production.

As Sophie, Martin-Fullwood commands. Besides being an admirable frontierswoman, she is also an activist. Through much of the play, she is at work on an address she intends to deliver to her fellow Black citizens about not selling their property to speculators.

Don Randle completes the able and attuned ensemble as Wil, a kindly aw-shuckster who spent time in Mexico and has set his cowboy hat on marrying Fannie.

Johnson’s portrayal of pipe-smoking Miss Leah reaches a satisfying apex when she begins telling a story of a young, enslaved woman whose apple pie was a source of delight to her enslaver. (At Sunday’s matinee, the audience acknowledged how much they appreciated the show and its skilled ensemble and how much Frank had incensed them, showering Hassan’s curtain call with boos and applause.)

Betts cleverly teases the two meanings of melodrama with “Flyin’ West.” There is the heightened version, in which on-stage brutality and outsized emotion figure. (Frank is downright dastardly; our heroines’ fates hang in the balance.) There is also the original sense of “melodrama” as a tale told with music. The sisters beautifully belt out the hymn “Walk on By Faith” (arranged by Larea Edwards, who composed the play’s original music); Minnie wails her lament, “In the Dark,” written by Hunter.

The director also knows his way around the story of Black towns in the West. His short documentary, “Dearfield: The Road Less Traveled” (which aired on Rocky Mountain PBS), recounts the history of the long-gone Black settlement in Weld County.