We are in the middle of an age of theatrical entertainers, such as hasn't been seen since the days of vaudeville - or since the days of Ruth Draper, which comes to the same thing. The new breed of Thespians harnesses conventional acting to a kind of magic show, pulling off every known dramatic illusion even while draping an arm around the audience's shoulder. The works are brief, often performed without intermission (a practice I should like to outlaw), and usually require only notional props - little more than some well thought-out lighting. The point is not so much to tell a story as to make subjective experience irresistibly vivid.
As it happens, both of the Manhattan Theatre Club's current offerings feature theatrical entertainers, and, by what I take to be a coincidence, both entertainers are black women. On Stage II, Charlayne Woodard delivers the third installment of her selective autobiography, In Real Life. A college grad with 'five serious monologues' and a determination to make it as a serious actress, Ms Woodard arrives in New York and promptly lands a starring role in the revival of Ain't Misbehavin', even though, according to her, she can't dance. I missed that long-running show, but I have every confidence that Ms Woodard would have made me see everything that she wanted me to see in her performance. Alongside funny if not overly charitable caricatures of fellow performers Nell Carter and André de Shields, Ms Woodard retails the career, its trajectory the inverse of her own, of a West Indian friend named Winston. Among other things, Winston allows Ms Woodard to puncture some generalizing myths about the sanity and self-discipline of Caribbean blacks; he is last seen howling for another dose of crack in a state of undress as he runs down the street and out of Ms Woodard's life. Let me pay Ms Woodard the ultimate compliment of saying that she really does not look old enough to have appeared on Broadway over twenty years ago. More to the point, though, she is an engaging spellbinder, and her show offers tons of you-go-girl fun.
Dael Orlandersmith - the author of, and one of two actors performing in, 'Yellowman,' on MTC's Stage I - made it very clear in a piece that she published in The New York Times a few weeks ago that her work is not autobiographical. Which is good news, since Yellowman does not have a happy story to tell. The title refers to Eugene, a light-skinned black who is not accepted even by his own darker-skinned father. The ball that Yellowman never fumbles is the profound, and all but undiscussable ambivalence about color that has understandably infected the descendants of people whose facial features doomed them to slavery. Eugene is envied and hated in the same breath. It's no wonder that, even at the age of twenty, he has not discovered a viable masculinity. Ms Orlandersmith has imagined a family tree for Eugene in which shame and resentment hang as heavy branches.
Even his romance with Alma, which ought to be the making of him, goes against Eugene. Alma, like Eugene's father, is darker, but being a woman seems to free her from the obligation to prove herself to other people. Determined not to repeat her single mother's degrading mistakes (panting like a dog when Alma's father pays the briefest of visits), Alma throws herself into her schoolwork and wins a scholarship to Hunter College that takes her out of the South forever. But she cannot take Eugene with her, because he is not prepared to set aside a way of life haunted by swaggering drink and tinsel honor.
Yellowman is a series of alternating monologues, with very little actual conversation, but the performances, directed by Blanka Zizka, build up great dramatic interest. Howard W. Overshown has the magnificent knack, especially when he's impersonating Eugene's father, of imperceptibly slipping into a deeper, angrier voice, so that several times I was shocked to notice that the relatively slight actor had assumed the menace of a bigger man. Ms Orlandersmith, who has toured with the Nuyorican Poets Café, fills her play with poetic declamation so old-fashioned that it's back in style. Grand but never grandiose, her writing deploys sensuous, earthbound imagery to render her characters' all too solid flesh. (November 2002)
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