May 6, 2026
Clouds but not yet the promised rain.
A perceptive review of Purification by Bruce Steele from Asheville Stages:
Purification at BeBe Theatre
What should you be willing to do to resist tyranny? Do the ends justify the means — even to the point of violence? These are questions that echo through history and through David Brendan Hopes’ thought-provoking new play Purification, now in its world premiere production by The Sublime Theater & Press at the BeBe Theatre in downtown Asheville.
The play establishes its themes right off the bat as actor/singer/guitarist Ben Mackel shares a portion of activist/songwriter Phil Ochs’ angry 1967 folk song “Small Circle of Friends”:
Enter this play’s small circle of friends, two couples bantering blithely at a coffee shop: Cecil (Braden LaMore) and Jim (Eric Martinez), and Diana (Chessa Budai) — Jim’s ex-lover — and Axel (Mackel), Diana’s new flame and the shop musician. Jim is clever, down-to-earth, and earnest; Cecil is stylish and somewhat pretentious (“People tend to exaggerate my vacuousness”); Diana is fun-loving but increasingly worried about the state of the nation (“Have you been watching the news again?” Jim asks. “Haven’t we warned you about that?”).
Jim’s mother has recently moved into an assisted living facility, and when Jim and Cecil set to sorting her belongings in a box-filled basement, they find a cache of papers belonging to Jim’s great-great-aunt, an early-20th-century activist named Anna Radzinsky. Reading aloud her manifestos on freedom and the oppression of the working class (“Hesitation is the luxury of the rich”) soon conjures Anna herself (Kai Chamberlain) onto the stage, and Purification reveals its parallel-time structure, alternating between 1911 and the present. Also on hand now and again is Vincenzo Peruggia (Mackel), a real historical figure best known for stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre (an incident without which the painting would likely have remained largely unknown to the world).
The 1911 scenes are the more engaging, as the stakes are clearer and the characters more intricately imagined, including a smart use of the then-newly published story of Peter Pan. (J. M. Barrie turned his 1904 stage hit into a novel titled Peter and Wendy, published in 1911.) Anna’s activism draws from historical figures such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, but Hopes gives the fictional Anna a connection to a wealthy New York family, allowing him to create the most resonant relationship in the play, the affectionate but fraught connection between Anna and her sister, Sophie (Budai), a New York socialite by marriage. (Sophie is Jim’s great-grandmother.) Their meeting for lunch at the upscale Manhattan restaurant Delmonico’s is one of the play’s two best scenes, and it introduces a likable waiter and Anna acolyte (Mackel). This character’s later scene with Sophie at her upscale home showcases the talents of Budai, Mackel, and Hopes in layered emotions and philosophical conundrums grounded in lived experience, and it’s brilliantly executed.
The present day scenes are more generalized, presumably because Hopes wanted to keep those characters more broad — Everypeople, serving as the audience’s stand-ins, rather than fully realized (and thereby perhaps less relatable). They also come to speak in more rhetorical, less natural phrasings as the story of Anna’s work inspires them to consider what they ought to be doing to resist in their own lives and times. (“Some of us are still processing. If we rush, we blunder.”) While LaMore and Martinez have a sweet chemistry as Jim and Cecil in earlier scenes, they have a harder time making the later debates come to life. It’s especially difficult to discuss tyranny while declining to name any particular politician, tyrant, or offense, as Hopes elects to do here.
Anna’s rhetoric, emerging from historical specificity, comes with more conviction, and Chamberlain comfortably embodies the character’s passion in speeches and interpersonal interactions. The small cast’s secret weapon is Mackel, who rises easily to each challenge: troubadour, comic rebel (as Perrugia, of whom the play could use more), earnest disciple, and so on. (Mackel was equally entertaining as Richard Dreyfuss in NC Stage Co.’s The Shark Is Broken last fall, a venue to which he’ll return as a musician next month, according to his program bio.)
As is his particular skill, director (and Producing Artistic Director) Steven Samuels makes the most of limited resources, keeping the focus on the characters and their cunundrums, so the bare-bones sets and furnishings aren’t a hindrance. One of the points of Hopes’ play is that words matter, and Samuels serves the local playwright’s text nimbly with that in mind.
I would guess that the script’s ending is as much a call for discussion as it is a provocation, and audience members will have much to talk about after the two-act play wraps. They’ll want to reconsider the questions that open this review, and also, perhaps, the pros and cons of equating the political situations of 1911 and 2026. Anna and her real-life counterparts worked to counter the power of the rich (a familiar current refrain) on behalf of the downtrodden and exploited proletariat. How they would react — and how modern activists should react — to a power grab by the wealthy and privileged that was supported at the ballot box by overwhelming numbers of that same downtrodden working class remains an unconsidered question.
To paraphrase one memorable line from the play: It would be a mistake to think that purification will be a natural process.
*
Steele finds the places that bothered me, too, either in the writing or in the watching. I know that instead of the twenty other things I’d planned to do, I’ll be revising that play.
