Category: Plays

The Milwaukee Rep welcomes theater back into the Stiemke Studio with Antonio’s Song/I Was Dreaming of a Son by Dael Orlandersmith and Antonio Edwards Suarez, directed by Mark Clements. The Rep describes the play as a “poetic journey of a dancer/artist/father questioning the balance of his passions — art, culture, family.”

This one-man work of art follows Antonio (played by Suarez) from the streets of Brooklyn to Russian ballet studios to fatherhood as he wrestles with stereotypes of ethnicity and gender, all while aching just to be his singular self. This is a memoir play, meaning it comes from Suarez’s lived experiences. The stories he tells are his own. But together with Orlandersmith, whose work is beloved and renowned for its poetry, these stories weave with music and movement for a truly artful, rhythmic experience.

In fact, the play is so dependent on movement that one almost wonders why it isn’t entitled Antonio’s Dance. Movement Director Alexandra Beller has been collaborating with Orlandersmith and Suarez for years on this project, for they always knew their play was meant to be as much a dance as anything. Per the Rep’s Audience Guide, Beller says: “Antonio did a lot of improvising while speaking the text and I cataloged what naturally came from his body. Then I would hone it and crystallize it and teach it back to him… But it had all been generated from his body through the text, and that seemed really magical to both of us.”

Suarez’s performance is indeed a magical one. His movements speak loudly, softly, and never stutter. He delivers poetry with strength and grace. Through the telling of his crisis of identity, Suarez takes on multiple roles, from his Bushwick bros to his own mother to himself as a child. This is, in the end, an exploration of the multitudes within us, and Suarez captures and beautifully exposes those that reside within him. He’s captivating.

The performance is backed by dynamic projection design by Jared Mezzocchi. The set is simple, with video and music lending the location and mood, with help from Lighting Designer John Ambrosone and Sound Designer Andre J. Pluess. This stripped-back scenery and the projections that support it keep the focus on Suarez and his storytelling.

If you’re wondering if this play is for you, consider this: There’s a moment in Antonio’s Song that speaks in praise of being a “citizen of the world.” That is who this play is for. This work transcends any one descriptor — it’s not just about race, gender, stereotypes, or parenthood. If you are devoted to your fellow humans, to their stories, their struggles, their triumphs, and to exploring just how much we have in common as citizens of the world, then Antonio’s Song is absolutely for you.

Antonio’s Song/I Was Dreaming of a Son is on stage now at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater through March 6, 2022.

Article by Kelsey Lawler for Broadway World.

InterAct’s latest production presents an interracial gay relationship through the scrim of memory.

In This Bitter Earth, a tender tragedy about the intersection of the personal and the political, the playwright Harrison David Rivers takes on two challenges: the depiction of interracial gay love and a restlessly nonlinear narrative.

The play, whose title is taken from a bluesy 1960 love song popularized by Dinah Washington, involves an attraction — really a collision — between two apparent opposites. Jesse (David Bazemore) is an earnest Black playwright, not unaware of race or history, but determined to focus on his art. His white boyfriend Neil (newcomer Gabriel W. Elmore, in an immensely likable performance) is both a child of wealth and privilege and a Black Lives Matter activist. Conflict, as we can imagine, ensues.

InterAct Theatre Company’s satisfying production — its second live staging under pandemic protocols — is directed with care and precision by Tyrone L. Robinson, with an emphasis on the easy, often scintillating chemistry between the two politically mismatched men.

In about 85 intermission-less minutes, the action hopscotches around the period between March 2012 and December 2015, and between St. Paul, Minn., (where Rivers himself lives) and various New York City locations.Advertisement

Both the burgeoning protest movement sparked by police (and other) killings of Black men and women — years before George Floyd’s murder made the world take note — and the growing mainstream acceptance of gay relationships provide the play’s charged backdrop. References to gay Black poet Essex Hemphill, a favorite of both characters, tie the two themes together.

InterAct producing artistic director Seth Rozin has described This Bitter Earth as unspooling “through the jumbled lens of memory.” That idea helps. So, too, do the projections of dates and locations, which orient (and occasionally disorient) us. Still, the play’s complex structure, with its repeated evocations of a single cataclysmic event, seems at least as much a demonstration of Rivers’ virtuosity as a narrative necessity.

On Colin McIlvaine’s set, an apartment bisected by a sidewalk and bathed in Shannon Zura’s purple lighting, Jesse frames the action with a monologue about his problems with balance. The language is poetic, and the malady, though real, is also symbolically suggestive — of the relationship and perhaps the society that complicates it.

The pairing between the lovers, who meet at a New York City rally in which Neil has taken a leading role, is a canvas on which Rivers dissects the pressures on high-achieving Black men. Bazemore’s emotionally reserved, slyly witty Jesse prefers to devote his talents and energy to the theater. But his chosen life with Neil connects him, however reluctantly, to the politics of the day, even if he leaves the marching to his boyfriend.

At times, the two traffic in the expected: Jesse derides Neil for his “white guilt,” and Neil criticizes Jesse for his apathy. When Neil points out that they’re living in a world that still can’t entirely accept that “Black Lives Matter,” it is Jesse who retorts: “All lives matter.”

But Jesse can’t remain permanently on the sidelines (or can he?). And surely mutual desire can’t forever fend off the varied forces threatening to tear the couple apart. This Bitter Earth is an elegy — a deeply moving one — to the relationship, and a dirge about what happens next.

“This Bitter Earth,” presented by InterAct Theatre Company at the Proscenium Theatre at the Drake, 302 S. Hicks St., through Feb. 20. Masks and vaccine proof required. Seating is distanced. Tickets: $35 Information: www.interacttheatre.org or 215-568-8079.

Article by Julia M. Klein for the Philadelphia Inquirer.