Naomi (Maeron Yeshiwas) is getting laid off from her job leading Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts at a nonprofit. At the same time, her dead grandma just left her the deed to a property in Missouri. It’s an enclave on the site of what one character calls a “plantation Barbie dream house,” where a family of white people gives tours that blithely omit the brutality of slavery.
In Rebecca Pierce’s “Bloodline,” these two phenomena are not unrelated. Yesterday’s chattel slavery and stolen land become today’s funding shifts, job losses and wannabe-woke cant that crumbles at the first poke.
What’s more, in Awesome Theatre’s production, which runs through Saturday, May 23, at the Eclectic Box, the figures connecting the dots are ghosts — including figures resembling the haints of African American folklore.
As Naomi, a modern-day seer, travels to the plantation to parse the mystery of her family’s land, other ghosts make their presence known, too.