A 'Covenant' of Biblical Proportions at ArtsWest

In York Walker's Covenant, hell is real. So is the devil. 

Making its Seattle debut at ArtsWest from Feb. 6 to March 2, this southern gothic thriller transports us to a small town in Georgia in the 1930s, where five characters come to grips with the price of their secrets and shame, with some delightfully unholy turns. In Covenant, the binaries are stark: there's good and evil, righteousness and sin, heaven and hell, churches and juke joints, truth and lies. 

Guitarist Johnny "Honeycomb" Walker, played by Donovan Mahannah, has returned to his small town after a spell of traveling. Returning as a blues virtuoso leads some to speculate he made a deal with the devil to come by his new talents. Simone Alene plays Avery, Johnny's love interest, who defies her mother to leave with Johnny. Mama, played by the incredible Felicia Loud, does everything she can to keep her girls on the straight and narrow. The cast is rounded out with Avery's younger sister, Violet, played by Deja Culver, and Ruthie, played by Kaila Towers, a neighbor friend of the family who always seems to be around.

The play begins with Ruthie, holding aloft a lantern, the only small flame on a dark set. "Everybody's got a secret. Everybody," she says, looking out at the obscured audience. 

For director Nicholas JaPaul Bernard, hearing that opening line immediately sends you to wherever your secret is. "She essentially is saying that to us that when it comes to our secrets, the things we don't want people to know are the things that we spend most of our time thinking about. … There are a lot of times where there's something that we really like to keep to ourselves, and we bottle it up and package it in just the right way so we're able to wake up in the morning." 

In the play, that pact, or covenant, we make with our secrets comes with a steep price. 

Covenant is JaPaul Bernard's directorial debut at ArtsWest, where he previously played the titular role in Hedwig and the Angry Inch in 2018 and 2023. 

When it came to approaching Covenant, JaPaul Bernard had a vision for how the play would look and feel, especially when it came to the shadowy darkness that encroaches on everything — a literal and symbolic representation of unspoken secrets. 

"Something that stuck out to me, specifically in the stage directions, were how alive the shadows were. There were a lot of mentions of people being able to grab things out of shadows, about shadows depositing things out of nowhere, about shadows coming in and coming out," JaPaul Bernard said. "I was also thinking about the nature of secrets and these dark, dark places that we put things. I started to think about black holes and the idea of this giant, colorless mass in the middle of nothing that not only sucks in everything around it, but it's also spewing things out and deep, deep, deep, deep, deep inside there, we will never know what's happening."

For most of the play, darkness prevails, with small lanterns and footlights giving the impression that light is the exception, not the rule. Tight set transitions transport us to graveyards, the family table, and sweaty juke joints. Sound designer Madelyn Zandt lets us hear the story through rushing winds, creaking doors, and other spooky sounds. There was a moment when I thought, Just how spooky is this going to get? Supernatural scares aside, the true horror here is the deadly nets of lies cast to protect secrets. 

There's a lot for the viewer to sink their teeth into, and close attention to the characters' soliloquies yields the rewards of juicy revelations as the story progresses. Even though the play begins with a man returning to town, it's remarkably less about the man himself, and more about the women whose lives are all upended to a degree, and their choices that follow. 

A lauded veteran of Seattle's stages, and half the founding members of Black Stax, Felicia Loud is a force. Loud played Billie Holiday in ArtsWest's Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill and HERE THERE BE DRAGONS, a one-woman show created by Loud. I wasn't the only one in the audience who held their breath in anticipation of what the matriarch would do next to keep the reins tight on her family. Simone Alene fits the bill perfectly as the rebellious daughter, and Deja Culver, who starred in ArtsWest's Clyde's last year, was incredible. When new family revelations come to light, and Violet starts to piece things together, we feel what she feels on the stage.

My only quibble is that the ending revelation felt slightly tacked on, dimming some of the satisfaction I looked forward to. I would have liked to see more of its development throughout the story, but that's more of a critique of the play itself and less about the production, which in my opinion was flawless. 

Catch Covenant at ArtsWest from now through March 2. Tickets are available on the ArtsWest website. While you're there, check out Rodney H. King's exhibit "Started Off in the Park," featuring the artist's acrylic works, on display until March 16.