THE DEVIL WENT
DOWN TO GEORGIA

York Walker’s Southern Gothic keeps
its secrets close and its audience on edge

Ashli René Funches

“Everybody got a secret”

That is the line that opens Covenant, the gripping play by York Walker, now playing on the Owen stage at the Goodman. It is about as tight a summation as can be applied to this beautifully acted Southern Gothic. Each of the five characters has a story to tell. One that they have never spoken of before; a story that explains the behavior that we’ve seen and will inform their actions in the events to come. But that’s not all. The play itself has secrets of its own — none of which will be revealed here — and in its ingenious construction winds up making a powerful statement about desire, trauma, and the weight of expectations, both personal and societal.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Anji White, Jaeda LaVonne, Ashli René Funches, Felicia Oduh, Debo Balogun

Covenant opens on a beautifully creepy set from Ryan Emens. A shell of an unpainted clapboard building centers the actions. This will mostly serve as the homestead of Mama (Anji White – in a terrifyingly domineering performance) and her daughters Avery (Jaeda LaVonne) and Violet (Felicia Oduh), a family living in rural Georgia in 1936. Outside the house, cornfields abound, a corner of one being the hangout spot for Violet and her best friend Ruthie (Ashli René Funches). The show opens with the return of Johnny James (Debo Balogun), a local boy who fled the town two years ago and has now returned to his home and best friend Avery. Oddly enough, in that interval, Johnny has gone from a tone-deaf plucker to a spectacular blues musician, both in his singing ability as well as his guitar skills. The change is so drastic that murmurs of supernatural influence and deals with the devil have started to spread in the town.

Jaeda LaVonne, Anji White, Felicia Oduh

Invoking Robert Johnson is the first of Walker’s clever feints. Johnny is merely the plot-driving element of the play, the agent of chaos that upends the careful and precarious balance of the lives of the four women. He has returned to claim the love of his life, Avery. He wants her to go on tour with him, and after a charming, and beautifully written courtship scene, she agrees.

But there is something wrong. Something is a bit off.

Felicia Oduh, Jaeda LaVonne, Anji White

Reviewing Covenant is an extremely frustrating task for me because its twists repeatedly upended my criticisms. My notebook has multiple lines of complaint that were scratched out as subsequent events make it clear that they were deliberate choices. This included my biggest initial complaint: one of the major performances, which I thought was stiff and unconvincing in several key scenes, but in retrospect, after Walker’s rug pull, made perfect sense. Alas, even identifying the performance as such would be a bit of a giveaway.

Jaeda LaVonne, Debo Balogun

So, I will simply say that all the actors are wonderful and perfectly pitched to the material, singling out Ashli René Funches, whose crafty performance balances pathos and exquisite comic timing in equal measure, sometimes within the same scene. Even without her expressive face in view, a single exclamation from her during one of the play’s most terrifying scenes brought the house down.

Anji White, Ashli René Funches, Felicia Oduh, Jaeda LaVonne

And speaking of terrifying, the multiple scary set pieces would not be nearly as effective without the terrific score (Mike Przygoda), sound (Dee Etti-Williams), and lighting design (Gina Patterson). Director Malkia Stampley clearly has a feel for the genre — her Christmas Carol (also at the Goodman) hewed more towards the creepy than most productions of that chestnut, much to my delight. This is a confidently and expertly directed show in a genre that’s difficult to pull off even on screen, let alone a stage in a small theatre. It is an accomplishment to be sure.

Ashli René Funches, Felicia Oduh

Covenant premiered Off-Broadway in October, 2023. Since then, the film Sinners used the transformative power of the blues in similar fashion, and even more so on stage by Terry Guest’s splendid Oak, which premiered at the Raven last year in Chicago. Oak even has a similar set of characters (a strict, overbearing mother, her two children, and their best friend), but Walker’s Gothic takes on a different tack than those narratives. Beneath all the genre trappings, this is a story about desire and guilt, and the stories we tell ourselves. What was initially, to me at least, the most theatrical element of the play — the monologues — is its masterstroke, allowing its characters to reveal themselves while offering them the dignity of the third person narrator.

Jaeda LaVonne, Debo Balogun

And for all my efforts to keep details of the plot under wraps, working my way through the events of the play in retrospect on my trip home, I laughed aloud when I realized that the big reveal was not really a reveal at all. It is a secret hidden in plain sight.

Maybe I was just too dense to spot it.

I wish I had the time to watch this again.

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photos by Hugo Hentoff

Covenant
Goodman Theatre
170 N. Dearborn St. in Chicago
ends on June 7, 2026
for tickets ($24–$74, subject to change),
call 312.443.3800 or visit Goodman Theatre

for more shows, visit Theatre in Chicago

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