Michael Dale’s Theatre Crawl – The Joy of Sitting and Listening
Karen Kandel in The Vicksburg Project (Photo: Richard Termine)
by Michael Dale
This week…
The Vicksburg Project at Harlem Stage. Closed.
Soledad at Theatre For The New City through January 22. Tickets $18, Seniors/Students $15.
Inexpensive and recommended…
The Wildly Inappropriate Poetry of Arthur Greenleaf Holmes at The Tank through February 9. Tickets $25.
Song Of Joy at The Tank through January 29. Tickets $25/$35/$50.
The Fire This Time Festival at the Kraine Theater through January 29. Tickets are pay what you can. With a name taken from a rhyming couplet from the African-American spiritual "Mary, Don't You Weep" ("God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, the fire next time"), this annual festival provides a platform for early-career playwrights from the African diaspora. I had a great time last year at one of their programs of ten-minute plays.
One of my favorite parts of live theatre is the listening…
I feel a sense of relief when the house light goes down, the actors appear, and for a while, I have no obligations but to sit and listen to what the artists want to communicate. This is especially welcome when they’re of a culture that’s not mine, exposing me to ways of everyday life that are common to them but foreign to me.
I live on the most diverse spot on planet Earth; a place where more languages are spoken, more religions are practiced and more heritages are celebrated than anywhere else on this globe. I find that attending live theatre, especially the kind of live theatre that’s produced New York’s smaller venues offering more affordable ticket prices, is a very satisfying way to be exposed to the cultures of those I share this city with.
This past weekend, I spent two very satisfying afternoons sitting and listening to artists telling me about their cultures.
"If you are an American, your ancestors came from England,”…
…a teacher reads to her students from an antiquated schoolbook.
"Now, what's wrong with that sentence?” she inquires. The kids respond with additional places of heritage, such as Mexico, France, Japan, and Germany. But the teacher waits for an obvious response that seems to be avoided.
Finally, she asks, “What about Africa?"
A Black child asks, “Does that count?”
The Vicksburg Project, premiering at Harlem Stage last weekend for a brief run presented by Mabou Mines and piece-by-piece productions, is a vibrant theatrical collage of stories and songs that brings to the forefront the types of lives that, in the collective memory of this country’s history, haven’t been sufficiently counted.
Created by Eve Beglarian (composer/writer), Karen Kandel (writer/performer), and Mallory Catlett (director), the piece is propelled by “From the Pen of a She-Rebel: The Civil War Diary of Emilie Riley McKinley”, chronicling the experiences of a teacher from Pennsylvania who lived at the Batchelor Plantation near Vicksburg, Mississippi during the 47-day Union Army siege that ended with the city surrendering on July 4th, 1863. Vicksburg never officially recognized the Independence Day holiday until 1976.
While McKinley was a Confederate sympathizer, it’s explained that her diary offers rarely written observations by a white person of that time that recognizes the humanity of at least one of the plantation’s enslaved Black people, named Mary. Thus, The Vicksburg Project proceeds to use numerous primary sources, paired with original material, to widen the audience’s understanding of the women and gender-expansive residents of this city – descendants of oppressors, descendants of the oppressed and sometimes descendants of both – as they live through the eras of Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement.
The material and performances obviously resonated with audience members Saturday afternoon, as the increasing applause after the curtain call obligated the company to return for another bow even after the houselights had gone up. Hopefully, The Vicksburg Project can return for many more bows in the near future.
While the title character of Carolyn Dunn‘s touching and (for me) educational family drama, Soledad, is of Cherokee, Chumash, and Tongva descent…
…the 18-year-old doesn’t begin to understand what that means until she finds a box filled with cassette tapes recorded with live music from long ago pow wows.
While all that Sunny (Jolie Cloutier), as she’s nicknamed, hears is a “bunch of wailing around,” her 19-year-old math tutor Alex (Bradley Lewis) is excited to give her a quick music appreciation lesson when he recognizes the voices of her parents, Thomas and Dora Sixkiller (Brett Hecksher and Ria Nez).
Bradley Lewis and Jolie Cloutier in Soledad (Photo: Max Ruby)
There’d be spoilers if I revealed too much about why Sunny wasn’t aware of this side of her family’s past, but as Alex explains, in their state of California, women were traditionally barred from most aspects of pow-wows (social gatherings focused on traditional singing and dancing) until the late 1980s when her mother, as part of the popular Sixkiller Singers, became the first woman to sing and drum with men.
Alex prides himself in being a prizewinning Grass Dancer, one who dances in a group to create a flat circle of grass which will be the space for the pow wow. With her curiosity piqued, Alex takes Sunny to a pow-wow where he teaches her the potato dance, where couples stay close by holding up a potato between their foreheads.
Directed by John Scott-Richardson for American Indian Artists (AMERINDA), Soledad is now on its “getting it up on its feet” stage, but I truly enjoyed the performances in the small-scale production and appreciated the insight into one culture’s use of music and dance to bond its community.
And I’m sure anyone of any culture can connect with the universal themes of parents hiding painful past events from their children and children discovering that their parents were once way cooler than they imagined.
So, there I was Friday evening, lounging on one of the comfy couches in the lobby bar of the Roxy Hotel…
…listening to actress/chanteuse Mardie Millit chatting about the upcoming show in Provincetown she’s putting together with her songwriting hubby Michael Garin, when I was suddenly distracted by what her spouse, the joint’s happy hour house pianist, was playing at the keyboard; a hard-driving 1950’s rock n’ roll interpretation of Stephen Sondheim’s “Good Thing Going.” He returned my surprised glance with a look that read, “Yeah, I’m going there.”
Shortly after, he followed-up with a piano rendition of “Losing My Mind” that owed more to James Brown than Barbara Cook, and it reminded me of how he once mentioned that, although many artists will give a jazz inflection to Sondheim’s music, Garin hears more funk in his compositions. “I just add a little more junk in the trunk,” he quips.
You can judge for yourself every Tuesday through Saturday from 6-8. No cover, just order something (I’m pretty crazy about their pastrami Reuben.) and drop a tip. And if you’re catching an 8 pm Broadway curtain, an entrance to the Canal Street A/C/E stop is steps away.
Curtain Line…
The difference between musical theatre people and the rest of the country is that the rest of the country thinks the British invasion began in 1964 with The Beatles while musical theatre people know it began in 1963 with Lionel Bart.