Plays about race are often tough sells, especially when the play has a didactic motive around a racially relevant moment in history. But even though The House That Will Not Stand, in a world premiere production at Berkeley Rep, is one of those plays, it still has lot going for it besides the history lesson at its heart.

The play, by Oakland-born playwright Marcus Gardley, is the first produced commission to come out of Berkeley Rep's Ground Floor play incubator program. It's set in 1836 in New Orleans in the home of Beartrice (, an African American woman with three grown daughters whose common-law husband Lazare has just died. I say "common-law husband" but in the course of the play Gardley lays out the customs surrounding plaçage, which was the legal practice of "placing" free women of color with white lovers in 18th and early 19th Century New Orleans, even though they could not be legally married. Beartrice was herself a placer, essentially a concubine to Lazare, who had a white wife from whom he was estranged. As the play unfolds we learn about the legal complexities surrounding plaçage, and the precedents set in which placers were able inherit money and property from their lovers, and we learn that Beartrice gets stuck without an inheritance as the post-Louisiana Purchase laws in New Orleans were eroding the rights of placers like her. She is determined, from the outset, to get her three daughters out of the country to France where they might be able to free themselves from this form of slavery.

Actress Lizan Mitchell plays Beartrice with great, stylized bravado and a sharp tongue, and she's met with equal force and stage presence by Harriett D. Foy who plays Makeda, Beartrice's slave and house servant. And yes, here's another piece of history Gardley lets us in on: There were plenty of African Americans who owned slaves, and in this case it was just a matter of a class difference. Fair-skinned Beartrice, who wants to free her daughters from white tyrranny in America, is ultimately responsible for the freedom of Makeda, whom she's promised to set free once she gets her inheritance.

The play is cleverly structured around several key conflicts, including a fight over whether daughters Agnes, Odette, and Maude Lynn should be allowed to go to a ball where placers are meant meet their future lovers. Gardley has added elements of magical realism, linked here to voodoo culture, which keeps things buoyant, and Ray Reinhardt does an adequate job portraying the not-quite-dead Lazare in his two scenes.

But it is Makeda's journey from enslavement to freedom that forms the true through-line of the play. Gardley spares little in dramatizing her plight, and we get everything from song, dance, and some rather melodramatic monologues along the way.

The House That Will Not Stand is hilarious and moving in equal parts, and often rises above didacticism in telling its tale, but it is also a play in need of some judicious editing. Director Patricia McGregor's choice to enlarge and exaggerate Gardley's already occasionally campy set of characters does not always do the play a service, either. I found myself distracted at many moments by broad comedy and booming melodrama that undercut the ultimate emotional gravity of the play. In fact, by the conclusion of the second act, I found myself feeling like I had just seen a comedy that hadn't warned me it would come to a deeply serious end.

The House That Will Not Stand plays through March 16. Get tickets here, and note that at Berkeley Rep, everyone under the age of 30 can get half-priced seats.