‘Covenant’ expands the legendary blues lore of the devil-at-the-crossroads

When blues musician Robert Johnson disappeared from the Mississippi Delta for months in the early 1930s, fellow musicians said he left with mediocre skills. But when he returned, he could play the guitar with dazzling speed, precision and complexity.

He had mastered the slide guitar and could coax such haunting tones from its hollow body, it gave listeners gooseflesh. Now he sang lyrics with supernatural themes: hellhounds on his trail and Satan knocking at his door. In one of his 1936 songs, “Cross Road Blues,” he described falling on his knees at a crossroads, crying out for spiritual intervention.

This magical transformation triggered gossip. Fellow blues singer Son House said Johnson must have made a deal with the devil. A piece of blues folklore was born.

Decades later, inspired by this legend, a playwright’s imagination sparked.

York Walker, a playwright originally from Chicago now based in Harlem, New York, reinvents Robert Johnson’s lore in his script for “Covenant,” a play opening on the Hertz Stage at the Alliance Theatre Oct. 8.

Jade Payton (left) plays the role of Avery in the 2023 Roundabout Theatre Production of "Covenant" in New York. Payton will play Avery again in the Alliance Theatre production in Atlanta Oct. 8-Nov. 9.

“What York does with ‘Covenant’ is not a retelling of the Robert Johnson mythology,” explains Alliance Theatre’s artistic director, Tinashe Kajese-Bolden, who directs the play. “It’s a ‘what if’ re-imagining: What if the story isn’t just about Robert Johnson, but is, in fact, a story about a community? One that now must reckon with this pact that is made and pierces through every home in this town, and blurs the line between the spiritual and the secular.”

“Covenant” is set in rural Georgia during the Great Depression. After a mysterious absence, the protagonist, 24-year-old Johnny “Honeycomb” James (played by Atlanta-based Jemarcus Kilgore), returns home without his stutter and with otherworldly skills on the guitar. Rumors spread. Could he have made a dangerous pact to acquire his gift?

His accomplishment, however, provokes his friends and family to confront their own fears, desires and secrets, including Avery (Jade Payton), Johnny’s childhood love.

Avery dreams of leaving her small town and seeing the world. When Johnny proposes, she sees an open door to a bigger life.

Jade Payton (left) played the role of Avery in the off-Broadway production of "Covenant" at the Roundabout Theatre in 2023. She will play Avery again in Atlanta in Alliance Theatre's production of the play, opening Oct. 8.

Upon her return, she too has changed in unsettling ways. Is she possessed? Has she suffered trauma? Violence? The community is aflutter with suspicion. Their reaction unearths questions about religion, shame, history, desire and ambition. Evil is afoot; but from where is it coming? From Johnny’s bargain with the devil? Or from the collective evil now surfaced in the community?

“It haunted me,” she said. “York writes in a way that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Your heart beats for these people who love so hard and so ferociously.”

She knew she wanted to stage the play in the fall for spooky season in Atlanta where the audience would undoubtedly see itself in the Southern gothic work.

“Our audience is coming in with a lived experience and a rhythm and a knowing of what it means to be in the South,” she said. “We’re not reaching far to create this world.”

For sound, she envisioned creating a natural audioscape. Sound designer Melanie Chen Cole drove to parts of rural Georgia to record chirping cicadas and the sounds of the South.

“We’re really bringing in the atmosphere — the living, breathing air — in many ways,” Kajese-Bolden said.

The minimalist set and eerie lighting, designed by Jiyoun Chang, is meant to evoke a sense of duality and suffocation.

“It feels like a burned home … everything emerges from the shadows,” Kajese-Bolden said. “ … The silhouettes of the different characters are really important to me. They tell me so much about their inner emotional life.”

Shadows and eerie lighting that cast silhouettes on stage is a design aspect Alliance Theatre's artistic director Tinashe Kajese-Bolden felt was important to recreate when staging "Covenant" at Hertz Stage. Pictured here: Violet, Mama and Avery in Roundabout Theatre's staging of the play in New York.

Depression-era costumes by Shilla Benning feature resourceful materials that appear handmade, while the intimacy of the Hertz’s black-box space, which seats 200, places the audience close enough to feel the swoosh of a skirt.

“The audience feels inches away,” said Payton, who joins the Alliance production as one of the original cast members from Roundabout’s New York staging.

Kajese-Bolden saw Payton in the original production of “Covenant,” and also directed her in 2024 when she played the leading role of Camae in the Alliance production of “The Mountaintop.”

Kajese-Bolden said she was eager to have Payton back.

“To expand and build on what she knows of Avery was great,” she said.

Payton has always resonated with Avery, said the 33-year-old actress who moved to New York from Las Vegas in fall 2022 to play Avery.

“Avery’s want is definitely for a world outside of the town and the people that she’s grown up with her whole life,” Payton said. “It felt like this play was describing me exactly where I was in that moment.”

The role, and play, has deepened for her since the first time, she said. It’s that kind of play. It expands as it builds; layers peel back; hindsight reveals seeds planted early in the story that pierce the earth later.

“It’s breathless,” she said. “The play is ever-changing, quickly shifting, like turn-on-a-dime type of style … it deals with secrets and rumors and wishes unfulfilled. There is definitely an unraveling.”