Michael Dale’s Theatre Crawl – When The Lights Went Out, A Music Genre Took To The Streets
Marlina Devery and Portland Thomas in Shedding Load (Photo: Russ Rowland)
by Michael Dale
This week…
Shedding Load at 59E59 through February 18. Closed.
Othello at Casa Clara through March 25. Tickets $99/$79/$29.
It took over 15 years for me to experience my first New York City blackout as a resident of this town…
That was in August of 2003, when the 29-hour outage began early enough in the afternoon so that most people were able to get home safely and neighborhood streets turned into block parties as restaurants started giving away their perishable food.
As teenager, I safely watched television reports of the infamous 1977 blackout from my parents’ Long Island home. New York was still in its “Drop Dead” phase when the lights went out that July evening, triggering rioting and looting throughout the city.
Playwright Jessica Owens uses those first few hours of chaos in ’77 as the focal point of her drama Shedding Load. The play’s title directly refers to the practice of, in emergency situations, decreasing the electrical output to some neighborhoods in order to preserve the grid. Sacrificing service to some customers for the greater good. Owens cleverly shifts the meaning of the title to refer to the gentrification of a Brooklyn neighborhood.
The entire play takes place in the living room of a decades-old townhouse in Bushwick, a neighborhood that for the first half of the 20th Century was largely populated by Italian immigrants and their descendants. A post-war economic decline led to a white flight to the suburbs and when the play opens on that historic night in 1977, the rising Black and Latino population has significantly changed the character of the community.
19-year-old Trish (Marlina Devery) who the playwright specifies as being white, is settling in for a cozy evening with her boyfriend Kenny (Teddy Trice) described by the author as BIPOC, when suddenly the lights go out. Upon realizing entire area has gone dark, Trish’s immediate concern is her father, who has been keeping the family’s nearby electronics store open late hours to try and increase business. But it isn’t long before they can see the flames from the burning store from their window.
Owens then starts jumping backwards and forwards, decades at a time, showing the neighborhood’s economic rise and decline through the experiences of Trish’s family in the past and the children she has with Kenny in the future, taking the play into the neighborhood’s 21st Century revitalization.
While not fully stated, Owens and director Mia Walker significantly allude to the opinion that the 1977 blackout jump-started the hip-hop movement. In one scene Trish observes how the live music she used to hear on the neighborhood streets has been replaced by the sounds of streetcorner DJs; perhaps suspecting it began with equipment looted from her father’s store. In a scene set in 2014, her daughter’s fiancé, a Black real estate investor whose father became wealthy as a music producer, explains his intention to build a high-rise in the neighborhood; a move that will attract upscale businesses that will no doubt price out many of the long-time locals.
Played by an ensemble of ten actors, most of whom portray characters that only make brief appearances, Shedding Load is more educational than emotional, but it tells a fascinating New York story that’s not only about the evolution of a community, but about how the concept of gentrification has evolved from the days when it was exclusively defined by a proliferation of young white professionals and David’s Cookies.
I first fell in love with acting on the stage of East Rockaway High School’s auditorium…
…where this shy, often bullied kid, discovered the power of making people laugh while playing Luther Billis in South Pacific. I played an Amish farmer who accidently gets drunk in Plain and Fancy, an American tourist mistaken for a spy in Don’t Drink The Water and an (ineptly) tap-dancing chorus kid in No, No, Nanette before taking my final bow on that stage in the summer of ’78 as Moonface in Anything Goes.
Last week, I made a first visit back to that Long Island auditorium to see my niece’s daughter play a pirate in Peter Pan. It was her first time in a musical and I’m happy to hear she loved the experience. The kids all did a great job.
Naturally the place has changed a bit in the past 45 years, but I had to smile at seeing an old familiar “face” in the crowd; the mounted clock on the back wall. Unlike the Peter Pan cast, we didn’t use microphones back then, so I would always aim my voice at the brightly lit clock stationed behind the sea of darkness, knowing that if the clock heard me, everyone else did, too.
I’m sure it’s not the same clock up there now, but it felt good to recall my old scene partner.
Usually, when a theatre production’s director is replaced during rehearsals, terse phrases like “creative differences” or “personal obligations” are used in order to explain the change with as little drama as possible…
However, when the opening of New Place Players’ intimate mounting of Shakespeare’s Othello was delayed, the company was quite open about how Founder/Artistic Director Craig Bacon was stepping down from staging the production in favor of Assistant Director Makenna Masenheimer because, as stated in press releases and in the production’s program, “(her) vision of the piece was the right way to address the complicated nuances a production of this play requires.”
The program also includes a statement signed by Masenheimer and Cultural Competency Consultant Ianne Fields Stewart, where the director, a multiracial Black woman, addresses the need for “a safe space to make dangerous work” when guiding her predominantly white cast to examine their own biases in preparing Shakespeare’s tragedy about “an accomplished Black man who is punished by the system he protected, proving that Elizabethan racism is the racism of today.”
Nathan Krasner, Matthew Dudley, Ryan Joseph Swartz and Eliott Johnson in Othello (Photo: Carol Rosegg)
I’ll leave it to the better qualified to opine on Masenheimer’s success in revealing parallels to contemporary racism in the centuries-old play, but I will certainly recommend New Place Players’ production purely for artistic enjoyment.
It’s always a treat to see theatre performed in non-traditional venues. Othello occupies Casa Clara, a barely noticeable building on E. 25th Street that dates back to 1848 and has been used as a 19th Century arts center and a 20th Century sculpture foundry. Arrive a little early to take in the display of large ornamental pieces mounted on the walls.
Most of the audience is seated in one row of chairs lining the rectangular playing space on three sides; the close proximity allows for understated performances by Eliott Johnson, whose Othello appears as a thoughtful observer and Conor Andrew Hall, whose cold Iago hides a controlled fury.
Music Director Flavio Gaete is part of a trio of musicians who mix original and period pieces to effectively underscore the drama.
Curtain Line…
Curt Weill: Composer of The Threepenny One-Act.