Category Archives: James Baldwin

Guirgis as Witness

James Baldwin wrote of William Shakespeare: “The greatest poet of the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the love of the people. He could have done this only through love – by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him.” Later Baldwin writes that one of Shakespeare’s duties as poet is “to bear witness”.

I believe that that aspect of Shakespeare’s legacy is something that Stephen Adly Guirgis shares.  His plays are the poetry of the people – the people that most works of American culture refuse to see (except in jail cells and witness stands in Law & Order) – and his great gift is to take the language of the streets and transform it into music. This year The Signature Theatre has produced two Guirgis plays: Jesus Hopped the “A” Train earlier this year and now Our Lady of 121st Street. Plot is not so important in either. Indeed, the major plot movements happen off stage. What is important is character: how individuals respond to terrible situations (some of which they are responsible) and how they try to progress on an arc to some better, more moral place. Those movements are often slow, laborious, and can be measured in inches rather than miles. Sometimes the epiphanies – as one might fight in the fiction of Flannery O’Connor – are too terrible to behold; a person’s moral compass may improve but not the material facts of their lives.

The revival of Our Lady of 121st Street, directed by Phylicia Rashad, is a propulsive production. A nun has died and her body has gone missing; that even at the end the question of whether that disappearance was a desecration or ascension (or both) fuels the ambiguity and complexity of the work on display. The real journey of the work is an internal one of the characters who have come to pay their respects. This is a rogue’s gallery of the desperate and the destitute. Those who have made something of themselves are in terms of spirit or soul no better off than those who have been left behind.

Yet, the play bristles with hope. Father Lux (John Doman of The Wire fame fuses a world-weariness into the role), who exhibits few of the talents or skills needed for a spiritual leader, senses a possible path to salvation. An alcoholic NYPD detective (Joey Auzenne) battles his own guilt over the loss of a loved one. A struggling actor (Kevin Isola), realizing he is in a stifling relationship with his boyfriend, seeks to carve his own path.

The music of Guirgis relies on rapid-fire dialogue and idiosyncratic monologues. They are entertaining, shocking, funny. Those qualities often mask that individual quests are underway, challenged by many a personal demon. The production has assembled an ensemble of actors that understands that the language is active, that is action. Among the highlights are Erik Betancourt (who also shined in Jesus Hopped the “A” Train)  and Maki Borden as two co-dependent brothers, Paola Lazaro as a bitter but highly intelligent con artist who may be the only character who gets what she truly wants, and Quincy Tyler Bernstine (the MVP from Vineyard’s The Amateurs) who commands in every scene she is in.

For more information about the show, please follow this link http://www.signaturetheatre.org but don’t wait too long because it closes this weekend.

 

Passing Strange Leaves Its Mark

Though often referred to as a musical, Passing Strange is more than that. It cold be called an autobiography/memoir/meditation accompanied by musical interludes eliding with moments of comedy and tragedy. There is a lot of that going around of late (see Bruce Springsteen on Broadway). I had seen the original on Broadway where book and lyric writer Stew (he shares composition credit with Heidi Rodewald) also told his story on stage. I did not know how such a work of self-confession would work without its confessor on stage. Ten minutes into the production at The Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, I realized that my worries were without warrant.

The Wilma’s presentation establishes that Passing Strange was not a piece that could thrive only with its original cast but as a seminal and innovative piece of new American theatre that belongs in the same movement with Hamilton and Hadestown. Indeed, it feels more necessary now than it did in its initial run. The clear parallels with james Baldwin’s story land with greater force as the novelist/essayist has returned to the spotlight in our current discourse. When it arrived in 2008, it was at a moment of hope. Now, here in 2018, the spirit of liberation becomes more emphatic, more urgent. American culture is no longer “the white experience”, despite what the Administration is trying to promulgate through its reactionary policies and politics, and Passing Strange articulates that new societal reality.

Director Tea Alagić has assembled a powerful ensemble cast. The elation and, in the end, painful dawning self-realization of its protagonist that comes with the journeys of Youth (a compelling Jamar Williams leaving his fingerprints on the role) through punk-rock Europe still lands with its concluding tragic punch. The final reckoning too between Youth and Narrator (Kris Coleman who releases his anger in measured proportions), his older self, found new and dramatic dimensions as Coleman was more part of the action while when Stew did the role he was stuck to one place because of his instrumental duties.

Coleman and Williams create electricity between them in their two-hander moments. They have able support from the rest of the cast. Lindsay Smiling is wonderfully loopy in everything he does. Savannah L. Jackson and Tasha Marie Canales portray the various women with whom Youth has romantic/sexual encounters. Their prickliness and ennui allows them to tell their own stories rather than being ancillary to his story. Anthony Martinez-Briggs, whom I had seen in Flashpoint Theater’s Hands Up, successfully mines every line for its comedic possibilities. Kimberly S. Fairbanks conveys an entire life in her scenes as Mother, and she infuses her final conversation with Youth with such elegiac anticipation; her voice belongs to the angels.

The Wilma space serves the work well, allowing Alagić to paint her canvas with the language and music of the piece, the acting, and some strategic use of video in service of setting of time and place.

I have only recently begun to explore Philadelphia theatre (Arden, Lantern, etc.), and, late in the game, I have come to the Wilma. I have been pleasantly surprised by this exploration and, with Passing Strange, have come to appreciate the City of Brotherly Love as a place with a rich theatrical life.

More information by the show can be found here: https://www.wilmatheater.org

 

Raoul Peck Has Made a Work of Essential Viewing

Let me just get this out of my system at the top: I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck’s exemplary documentary on James Baldwin, was robbed at the Oscars. In the interest of full disclosure, I didn’t see the OJ documentary, and now I really don’t want to. I think OJ mania may tell us a lot about our media-saturated culture, James Baldwin’s life, work, and vision speaks to the entirety of American culture, history, and society. Peck brings that vision to the fore and expertly demonstrates how Baldwin’s analysis of American life, which he developed in the Civil Rights Era, still has application in our post-Ferguson time.

Baldwin famously states, “The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.” In a nation that infamously “forgets” its past — how few of my students know when Pearl Harbor occurred — Baldwin is fierce in his argument (rightly) that the history of slavery and Jim Crow still is very much part of our present. This tenant serves as Peck’s thesis.

The film builds upon Baldwin’s notes for a planned but never completed book Remember This House. It rests on a three-legged stool of Baldwin’s friendships with three very different but significant figures: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Another important relationship touched upon is his friendship with Raisin in the Sun playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Peck and Baldwin both are emphasizing the importance and synthesis of culture to politics. Baldwin again cogitates on the line between witness and actor (as in someone engaged in political activity); it is a blurred but fine line. And what emerges is how necessary Baldwin was to our changing perceptions during the 1950’s and 1960’s. As much as it was about bus seats and votes and marches, it was also about where those not white fit into the culture. Speaking of a John Wayne Western, the writer has the epiphany that he was the Indians.

I was struck by a clip from The Dick Caveat Show. Baldwin is joined by a saged academic from Yale University (a philosopher I believe). This professor challenges Baldwin on race, but invoking class! Doesn’t Baldwin have more in common with a white author than a black sharecropper? Firstly, I was amazed that this man would use class prejudice as a way of mitigating racial prejudice. Secondly, he — a learned and educated man — fails to grasp the truth in front of him in 1968: race is class.

Peck masterfully employs a large dose of Baldwin’s cultural criticism — particularly as race has been portrayed in American film — as part of his narrative. Why? Because legislative achievements are one thing, but that history Baldwin speaks of lives on in our attitudes and perceptions. It is present.

Samuel L. Jackson reads a number of Baldwin’s letters and essays. I knew going in that he was doing that, but still, I did not recognize — what is his usually distinct — voice. Jackson’s work adds to the power of the documentary.

I found the film so essential that it has inspired me to create a course exclusively on James Baldwin for my university.

Amen Baldwin

During my recent trip to London, I had the opportunity to see James Baldwin’s Amen Corner at the Royal National Theatre (best theatre in the world, in my humble opinion). I had been familiar with Baldwin’s novels and essays but never his work for the stage. So this was an opportunity to dive into what was for me an unknown corner of the Baldwin canon.

Benefitting a show at the National, the production was magnificent. Both the gospel choir and jazz trumpet provided texture as well as counterpoint to the drama enacted on stage. Marianne Jean-Baptiste (of Secrets and Lies fame) was a revelation as Margaret Alexander, the pastor of a corner church up in Harlem in the 1950’s. Director Rufus Norris recreated Harlem of that era magnificently.

But what I went for was the play. And did I get a play. Written in 1954 after the author had completed his novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, Amen Corner distinguishes itself for the beauty of its language (this is Baldwin after all) and the complexity of emotions that inform that language. There isn’t a Caucasian character on stage and white America is rarely mentioned, but the audience can feel its presence. Those who attend and lead the church are, for the most part, domestics and servants. Church provides for them an escape but also an opportunity, even if one day a week or late at night, to take charge of their destinies. At the center of the drama are four very strong women who to one degree or another must negotiate the city and life on their own. There are no clear heroes or villains here. Even Sister Moore as she tries to undermine Margaret’s authority is often more tolerant of other people’s life choices than her pastor is.

Margaret is faced with a series of crises in the play. Her wayward husband, Luke (a jazz musician), returns home after a number of years. He is the opposite of everything Margaret in her role as pastor stands for. Luke, however, is dying and wishes to spend his final days with his family. Her son, David, does not wish to continue playing piano for the church, but instead wishes to be a jazz musician like his father. And then there is the rebellion led by Sister Boxer and Sister Moore. What unfolds are the myriad reasons — personal, emotional, intellectual, spontaneous, revelatory — that brought Margaret to a life serving God. Baldwin expertly intertwines all of these reasons to create a full-blooded three-dimensional character. If at that end, we still cannot fully embrace Margaret, we have a thorough understanding and respect of her. We know from Baldwin’s biography that he had a difficult time with organized religion, but he has the compassion to compose a thoughtful and well-balanced portrait.

Of course, as I sat in the theatre in London, I could not help but ask myself, “Why isn’t this play being done in America?” This is an important and vital work — more alive and less musty than other plays from this period we venerate — and tells an important story, like Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, about both the African-American experience and women’s experiences. So, theatre producers, find a way to put this provocative important beautiful play on stage here in the States. It deserves to be seen.