Review: SpeakEasy Stage's COVENANT Delivers on Promise

With Halloween just weeks away, Greater Boston theater companies are presenting familiar titles for audiences looking for seasonal thrills – “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” “Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors,” “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” and “Little Shop of Horrors,” to name but a few.

SpeakEasy Stage Company is also going the thriller route but with a Southern gothic spin, opening its 36th season with a chilling production of “Covenant,”  at the Roberts Studio Theatre, Calderwood Pavilion, Boston Center for the Arts, through October 17.

Written by York Walker, and under the taut direction of SpeakEasy Producing Director Dawn M. Simmons, the play is set in a small town in rural Georgia in 1936 where long-buried family legacies of slavery and racism still roil through some of the population. Front and center are volatile Mama (a commanding Crystin Gilmore), her two very different daughters, Avery (a fascinating-to-watch Deannah Dripp Blemur), who’s romantically involved with traveling musician Johnny “Honeycomb” James ( a complex Anthony T. Goss), Violet (a heart-breaking Sydney Alicia Jackson), and Violet’s loyal friend Ruthie (the gently disarming Kayla Sessoms).

As Simmons explained in a prepared statement, “‘Covenant’” asks what happens when the truth becomes inconvenient—and what we do with the stories that take its place. York Walker has created a world where rumors can become reality, belief can become dangerous, and the supernatural world feels uncomfortably close to reality.”

The single-act 90-minute drama opens with Ruthie, whose quiet demeanor allows her to function as an outsider looking in, stepping from the darkness into the moody stage lighting by Kevin Dunn, which filters through Saskia Martinez’s simple set design of weathered lumber walls and a worn plank-board floor, to warn the audience that everyone has a secret that will eat away at – and ultimately destroy – the person they love most.

The story behind that ominous prediction begins to unfold with the reappearance of 20-something Johnny, a young man of questionable character who had left home a couple of years earlier a stutterer and not-too-hot guitarist and has returned a consummate musician and confident lothario. Johnny seems to have been inspired by the character Sammie “Preacher Boy” Moore from the 2025 feature film “Sinners,” who was in turn loosely based on Robert Johnson, an influential musician and songwriter from the early 20th century who, legend has it, sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his musical prowess.

James has come home looking to rekindle his romance with Avery, who he believes is the only person who ever had faith in him and whom he has loved since childhood. When he finds her, Avery is prayerful and not immediately receptive to his toying advances.

Always in Avery’s mind, and often in her sight, is her hyper-religious mother, who sees the blues as the devil’s music and has given her daughters a pious upbringing. Mama prefers Avery and is mercilessly cruel to Violet, who spends her free moments with her best friend Ruthie.

Tensions among the characters mount when Johnny decides to go on tour and take Avery with him. Avery’s eagerness to accompany him becomes a bone of contention with her mother and Violet, neither of whom trust him. Johnny wins out and Avery runs away with him, while promising Violet and Mama that she’ll be back very soon. When she finally does return, she’s not the same. Johnny says she was kicked in the head by a horse, but Violet knows otherwise, while an unspooling Mama lays the blame on him and the devil.

Hints of the supernatural see the characters engulfed by secrets, involving infidelity, shame, violence, a love that in the 1930s dared not speak its name, and the ache for a better life.  Each woman expresses her pain, but Walker’s sometimes confusing writing too often turns what could have been meaningful self-reflection into merely folksy aphorisms.

Some of these work better than others, and at times it is difficult to tell what’s really going on. Walker could have done more to delineate between the real and the surreal, but this production does benefit from Mackenzie Adamick’s nuanced sound design and Justin Ellington’s original music, which give a frightening feel to everything from a storm to what might be a satanic invasion. Danielle Domingue Sumi’s costumes add considerably to the period look of the proceedings – downplaying Ruthie’s prettiness, emphasizing Johhny’s muscular physique, making Avery’s feminine appeal obvious, and giving churchgoing Mama and Violet each a purposefully modest look.

While the perhaps intentional murkiness of Walker’s script leads to more questions than answers, it may be enough this spooky season that it does provide some spine-tingling scares, especially in this well-mounted, well-acted production.

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