Review: Gloucester Stage's MOON MAN WALK Shows Gravitational Pull of Grief

Playwright James Ijames’s 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winning, Tony Award-nominated drama “Fat Ham,” his contemporary reimagining of “Hamlet,” was given a memorable production by the Huntington in association with Alliance Theatre and Front Porch Arts Collective in Boston three years ago.

With “Moon Man Walk” – being presented by Gloucester Stage Company at the Natti-Willsky Performance Center through September 26 – theatergoers have the chance to experience the deeply affecting regional premiere of an earlier work by Ijames, from 2015, that tells the tale of Spencer (Dom Carter), an introspective man who returns to his boyhood home in Philadelphia after learning that his mother has passed away unexpectedly and his subsequent life when his mind is flooded with unanswered, sometimes unanswerable questions.

Ijames’s deeply moving one-act, 85-minute play glides back and forth in time. Sensitively directed in Gloucester by Lyndsay Allyn Cox in a jewel-box production, the four-person cast is led by the superb Carter, winner of the 2026 Elliot Norton Award for Best Performance by an Actor for his portrayal of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the Front Porch Arts Collective production of “Mountaintop.”

This story of an American family follows Spencer and his life with his mother Esther (a luminous Kalala Kiwanuka-Woernle). The plot involves flashbacks, and musical interludes. Many of the flashbacks and waking dreams involve a version of Spencer’s absent father Kesi (a gravitational Dereks Thomas), who shows up in Spencer’s mind and memories as the Astronaut his mother said he was to explain his absence to her son.

As Spencer envisions his dad on the moon, the lost in space father is clearly heroic in his mind. In Carter’s affecting portrayal, Spencer’s fantasy world seems convincingly real. His true reality, however, is solitary and finds him immersed in books. His quiet grounding is upended by his mother’s passing and by a free-spirited young woman, Petrushka (a lively Lorraine Victoria Kanyike), who he meets on his flight home to Philadelphia, and who follows him back to his deceased mother’s house, glomming on to him like a vine to brick. Spencer and Petrushka don’t always make the most logical couple, but the actors make the improbable relationship work.

Helping make the whole production work is Dahlia Al-Habieli’s scenic design, which includes a lived-in living room – complete with a record player and a stack of vintage jazz and pop albums including Aretha Franklin’s cover of Ashford and Simpson’s “You’re All I Need to Get By,” which briefly fills the stage in Aubrey Dube’s measured sound design – and floating multi-color circles signifying space.

Like memories born of grief, “Moon Man Walk” is absorbing and intimate. You won’t be able to look away from it, and you won’t want to.

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