Any time you can spend with a master storyteller is time well spent; and when the storyteller is Psalmayene 24, you know you’re in for a rewarding, though-provoking evening. This time, digging into his past, with all the joys and pain that growing up involves, audiences can look forward to a performance that is by turns dazzling, drop-dead hilarious, but with moments of darkness that remain all too familiar.
Director and Production Designer Natsu Onoda Power has given us a theatre littered (literally) and plastered with written and typed pages-some crumpled and piled up on the stage, some hung out on clotheslines, to be pulled into the action strategically. Psalmayene 24 and his scene partner, the brilliant actor and rhythmic artist JabariDC, begin the action by pulling out a couple leaf-blowers to clear the floor (to the accompaniment of selections from Nick “tha 1da” Hernandez’ sound design).
Psalmayene 24
The introductory monologue, steeped in hip-hop, ranges in pace from deliberate and crystal clear to a cascade of syllables, delivered at astonishing speed, in the same spirit with which Charlie Parker and Dizzie Gillespie played their own instruments. A reminder that the human voice is an instrument in its own right, and rap provides Psalmayene 24 with a means of demonstrating his virtuosity.
The narrative thread for “Dear Mapel” is clear enough-an estranged son’s letters to his biological father, whom he only sees rarely, and even then not under the best of circumstances. Early letters detail the milestones of adolescence: Psalmayene’s first sexual experience; his first encounter with racist taunts directed at him personally; and, later on, his band’s attempts to wow the audience at the legendary Apollo Theater in Harlem on “Amateur Night.”
Psalmayene’s years living in Washington, D.C., and his time at Howard University, feature prominently-which gives the night a special vibe, as fellow Howard alums in the audience chime in. What makes this such a joyful show is the way we’re encouraged to respond vocally, viscerally, and personally, to all the twists and turns of Psalmayene’s story.
Another performer who gives “Dear Mapel” an especially thrilling vibe is JabariDC, who steps in sometimes as Psalmayene’s scene partner, and who provides rhythmic accompaniment throughout the show on a variety of percussion instruments. His range of styles enables us to track Psalmayene’s life journey in a variety of moods, propelling the action forward but also punctuating each plot twist with its own emotional import.
You have one more week to see this latest incarnation of Psalmayene 24’s life story; It’s compelling, it’s alive, it’s personal, it’s what theatre is truly for.
[Reviewer’s Note: On the evening I went to see Mosaic’s stellar production of “Dear Mapel,” the projection equipment had malfunctioned, so I can’t speak to the work of Kelly Coburn, except to say that by the looks of it, Coburn’s work will serve as icing on an already well-served cake.]
Publicity Photo courtesy Mosaic Theatre.
Running Time: 90 minutes without Intermission.
Dear Mapel runs through February 13 at the Atlas Performing Arts center, 1333 H Street NE, Washington, D.C. It is also available through streaming, for those who prefer to attend remotely. For tickets, visit http://www.mosaictheater.org/ or call the Atlas box office at 202-399-7993.
Freud and C. S. Lewis meet and argue about God in the European debut of Mark St. Germain’s delectably brainy play.
Photo Credit: Alex Brenner
Great minds meet at symposiums, state dinners, literary circles, in the theatre. They get together and discuss their theories, arguing and tearing each other apart in dramatic fashion. What happens when two of the most famous men of their time clash in a small Hampstead office right when the Second World War is about to explode?
When C. S. Lewis enters the ageing Sigmund Freud‘s study, he thinks he’ll have to defend his choice of slandering the father of psychoanalysis in his latest book. But Freud isn’t interested in that, he’s heard of the image his colleague painted and isn’t too bothered in his old age and failing health. What irks him is the fact that Lewis has, out of the blue and totally unexpectedly, gone from being a fervent atheist like himself to being a pious Christian man. Unacceptable, according to him.
Mark St. Germain‘s play Freud’s Last Session was an Off-Broadway hit about a decade ago and it’s now getting its long-awaited European premiere at the King’s Head Theatre directed by Peter Darney. Doctor Julian Bird (a real life psychiatrist turned actor in the early noughties, there probably isn’t a better role for him) and Séan Browne are the pugnacious peers. Factually, nothing really happens in the show but for a great battle of wit on theology and philosophy. It’s delectably brainy.
In reality, the two never met and the source material for St Germain’s text is an equally thought-provoking book by professor Armand Nicholi, The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life. That title is all it takes to sum up the play.
With their positions being diametrically opposed and often brought up in related discussions, it’s a joy to see their spirits in the same room. They spar relentlessly, interrupted only by Freud feverishly turning the radio on to check if there are any reports of the impending declaration of war, the occasional military aircraft flying overhead, and phone calls to and from his daughter Anna.
Brawn is a tall and proud Lewis, towering over Bird’s Freud with his tinny Germanic accent and hobbling frame. They hit the other’s views, finding every weak spot, wounding their pride and patching it up only to attack again. Lewis is smug and slightly haughty with faith, whereas Freud is weary with cynicism. They (and therefore their core ideas) both contradict and justify themselves constantly, shaping and adapting theories to suit their interests and endgames.
The threat of war becomes fertile ground to debate whether God is actually good. Hitler’s spirituality and past as an altar boy also come into question as Lewis brings up his God’s greater plan and Freud points out the injustice and hypocrisy of Nazi cruelty. Inflammatory statements are made and the argument rages on.
It’s a stimulating show, one that will challenge the audience to bring their own beliefs to the table and see them destroyed and rebuilt on stage. It’s intellectually tense and truly well-written in its investigation of the two men and their ideologies. Whether people agree with one or the other, it’s quite the cerebral night out.
Director and curator Carl Hancock Rux. Photographer Ifa Bayeza.
Carl Hancock Rux is a tour de force. We first met at a Theatre Communications Guild panel in 1998. That day, he invited me to his concert performance which launched Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater on October 16. I did attend that day, and I’ve been following Carl’s creative career ever since.
That first event was a concert reading of his opera, Blackamoor Angel, about the Sub-Saharan African Angelo Soliman, who in 1727 was kidnapped and enslaved at the age of eight and brought to Vienna, Austria. There he rose in stature to become tutor and chamberlain to princes, colleague to Mozart and Haydn, and confidante of the emperor. Yet, upon his death, his skin was flayed from his flesh and stuffed for display among the other African “beasts” in the imperial natural history collection, where it remained until destroyed by fire fifty years later.[1]
Elements emblematic of Rux’s later style were evident in the opera’s embryonic performance. As librettist and leader, he had assembled a powerful collaborative team, including composer Deirdre Murray, director Karin Coonrod, a full chamber orchestra with a chorus of powerful singers. The story of Soliman’s anguished history was conveyed with a sonorous lyricism that revealed a mind equally intellectual and poetic, as well as one keenly aware of environment. In this case, the loud cacophony and excitement of a club opening seemed to evoke the atmosphere surrounding Rux’s woeful protagonist in both his glory and ignominy. The space became part of the drama.
My next encounter was his musing on James Baldwin for New York City’s 2014 Year of James Baldwin, a celebration of the pioneering writer. Rux’s tribute imagined an encounter between Baldwin and iconic musical genius Dinah Washington, played magnificently by Marcelle Davies-Lashley. A byzantine crystal chandelier lay on the floor while, at the nadir of her career, the famed blues singer talked to her reflection in her backstage dressing-room mirror. Then, in a documentary video clip of a contentious interview between Baldwin and an assaultive interlocutor, Baldwin riddled every question in a percussive, high tenor staccato, precise as artillery. Interwoven were scenes with prose spoken in Rux’s hypnotic baritone, delivered with his signature stillness. While the parts remain nebulous in memory, the impression of the whole lingers still.
Since that time, the two of us have had numerous collaborative adventures. On the eve of the publication of my novel Some Sing, Some Cry, co-authored with my sister Ntozake Shange, Ntozake and I gathered some friends to read sections of the book in her Brooklyn garden. Rux read a passage of mine. Upon discovering that a jolly bachelor party descends into a gang rape of the house maid, Rux expertly shifted his delivery with such profound abruptness, it took one’s breath. A few years later, as Distinguished Visiting Artist at Brown University, I invited him to direct two of my plays, String Theory and Welcome to Wandaland. More recently, in 2018, when I was Resident Artist in New Iberia, Louisiana, Rux came down to help mount my musical, Bunk Johnson. . .a blues poem, which made its debut the week after my sister died. Given the circumstances, it was the last place I wanted to be, but so many people were depending on me, I powered through, learning how to swallow my pain and exhale joy. That was Bunk’s story and mine, too, that week. Rux with his electric energy and insanely funny antics off-stage—so different from the gravitas of his stage persona—kept me buoyant. These prefatory remarks should serve as full disclosure: when it comes to Carl Hancock Rux, I am both a friend and fan.
It was with great anticipation that I made plans to see his production celebrating Juneteenth on Saturday, June 19, 2021 at New York City’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. By divine serendipity, only two days before, the date had just been declared a federal holiday and signed into law by President Biden. The declaration was sprung upon the nation so fast that there was little time to absorb the significance, let alone the facts behind the date: the final triumph of the Union in the Civil War, the acknowledgement, if not acceptance, of defeat by the rebellious Confederacy, and, in the “land of the free,” the liberation of four million people from state-sanctioned human bondage.
While the state of Louisiana and parts of South Carolina had been under Union occupation since 1862 and ’63, respectively, and though Robert E. Lee had signed the treaty of surrender to General Grant at Appomattox in April 1865, Texas—long cultivated as a laboratory for the slavocracy’s imperial ambition—was the last hold-out. Desperately clinging to their dream and “property,” slaveholders aplenty from Louisiana to Arkansas had fled with their caravans and coffles of Africans to the far reaches of the state. On the island of Galveston, just off the Gulf Coast, Union General Gordon Granger got around to announcing our emancipation to a small cluster of Black folk on June 19, 1865, two months after the war purportedly was over. On the balcony of the Alton Hotel, he read from a handwritten note, just ninety-three words:
The people are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property, between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them, become that between employer and hired labor. The freed are advised to remain at their present homes, and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts; and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.[2]
Banished to the post by General Grant, who disliked him, Granger seemed to have no grasp of the moment’s significance. While there is no record of the crowd’s response, such is the poetry of Black folk that someone put our jubilation into a contraction—Juneteenth! Ever since, African Americans have marked the day with celebration. First in Texas and then nationally, it has become a date of memory—collective joy—when we as a people may commemorate both triumph and deliverance, and if a bit qualified, the declaration of our independence and “absolute equality.” To mark the date, Carl Hancock Rux’s Juneteenth exposition at Mr. Lincoln’s Center was a Happening, in all senses of the word: a multimedia, multi-genre performance, traveling across space, time, and history.
Prelude
As I arrived, a medley of pre-show guests gathered under a huge white tent, pitched on the 62nd Street side of the Center. Though the sky threatened rain, Lincoln Center Executive Director and CEO Henry Timms, standing at the entrance, greeted everyone with elation. Rux’s presentation was to be part of the re-envisioning of Lincoln Center, democratizing the vast concrete plaza as the new public square. The repurposed environment, he explained, would include a voting center/vaccine center and the newly created green space—which, even under the ominous, greying skies, was filled with young families and children frolicking on the man-made hills. The Juneteenth program was one of Lincoln Center’s first public events, post-Covid, and though the attendance would be limited, the sense of release and relief defied even the few protean sprinkles. Everyone carried an umbrella tucked away. We weren’t going to miss this.
In short order, Rux appeared, wearing a white summer tuxedo of his own design, with a red and black floral shirt, the pants Bermuda-length—Frederick Douglass meets Patrick Kelly. (A characteristic of Mabou Mines, where Rux has been a long-standing member: when the director arrives, the show begins.) His tailored white jacket’s breast pocket was emblazoned with the words “REFUSE, RESIST, REBEL, REVOLT,” and wound round the jacket sleeve were double black armbands of mourning. On the back of the jacket were silkscreened images of a quartet of photos from Carrie Mae Weems’s 1995 exhibition, mounted in response to “Hidden Witness,” the Getty Museum exhibition showcasing antebellum images from their archives of Black lives. Among her creations were four re-treated photographs originally made in Columbia, South Carolina in 1850 at the behest of Louis Agassiz, the celebrated father of American natural science. They are among the earliest known photographs of Southern slaves. In his dogged effort to disprove the fundamental equality of man, Agassiz had the four subjects stripped naked and posed, vulnerable and powerless. Weems overlays each image with plexiglass tinted a dense, fresh-blood red.
Director and curator Carl Hancock Rux and guest at pre-show reception. Photographer Ifa Bayeza.
As Rux moved about greeting guests—Carrie Mae, herself, Lynn Nottage (who contributed lyrics for the event), colleagues from Mabou Mines—this quartet of Africans silkscreened to Rux’s back in that field of white, stood as sentinels, both shielding the wearer and silently alarming and assaulting viewers with their dignity, sorrow, and rage: their humiliation brimming from eyes glazed with tears.
His shoes spoke of another era: Platform, patent-leather with crepe ties, they were Cotton-Club-Cab-Calloway-Josephine dancerly! The pre-show costume was an overture, a condensed highlight of what was to come. The pain, the joy, Black taps and Taps.
A stunning young African-American couple arrived late to the gathering, dressed in matching white quilted fabric: the woman in a flowing sheath with an irregular hem cut on the bias, and the man in loose knee britches and tunic, their hair African crowns of natural spirals. They turned out to be our guides for the evening: Jamel Gaines as “Emansuh Patience, an escaped slave man” and Valerie Louisey as an “Anonymous Woman.” Later joined by veteran actor Stephanie Berry, playing “Ain’tGotNuhPatience,” the three together, through dance, gesture, and improvised prompting, would usher us through the multi-tiered event.
There was no printed program. The evening would demand our undivided attention without distracted glances at the page. Background information provided later allowed me to contextualize what I had experienced. In the moment, though, the absence of a program was part of the event. Untethered, I became kin to thousands of my forebears, freeing themselves by fleeing toward the Union lines. Largely nonliterate, for centuries as fugitives, they had made their way by reliance on the signs in quilts and nature, the coded lyrics of a song, patterns in the sky. Could they read the stars on a grey night such as this?
The evening was to be a sort of “station drama,” most often associated with both the medieval mystery play and German expressionist theatre. The clandestine stops of the Underground Railroad, commonly referred to as “stations,” also came to mind, as random parties of the audience moved sometimes warily from space to space, unsure of what was to come.
Rux’s work has enjoyed an ever-shifting traveling band of extraordinary collaborators. The Juneteenth Project was comprised of an ensemble of about fifteen performers and a dozen crew members, among them, in addition to Nottage, Rhythm & Blues Foundation Hall of Famer Nona Hendryx (better known now for her new age experimentation), singer-songwriter Toshi Reagon, and again Marcelle Davies-Lashley. Rux conceived the event and served as curator, researcher, and director. The evening, however, seemed a creative collective. Each of the component parts had a distinct flavor and scale. All possessed the vivid and intense sounds and colors of Blackness in simultaneous mourning and celebration.
The performance spread over three distinct settings across the center’s vast campus. One setting to the north would occupy the Hearst Plaza and the Olympic-size Paul MiIlstein Pool. Another performance area would run alongside 62nd Street and abut Damrosch Park. In front of the opera house on the walkway connecting the north and south campus sat a giant trapezoidal platform at least a story-and-a-half tall.
Constructed by Diane Smith, the tower was skirted with undulating waves of ruffled paper that spilled onto the granite at its base. Atop sat the torso of a diminutive human, Helga Davis as “Statue of Liberty? (One Tall Angel),” her exquisite ebony face framed by the twilight and a very animated cerulean wig. She completed the ensemble with mismatched red and white evening gloves. In front of the opera house, she was delivering an absurdist Dada-inspired aria of the National Anthem. Beckoned by “Aintgotnuh Patience,” I proceeded to the next installation.
Read the full article by Ifa Bayeza for The Massachusetts Review here.
“The Tempest” is a beautiful, exciting, and fitting production to conclude the festival’s thirty-four-year tenure at Boscobel. (The company is decamping to a nearby, equally glorious setting along the Hudson next season.) Under the incisive direction of Ryan Quinn, and with thrilling choreography by Susannah Millonzi, the play, Shakespeare’s last, opens with the titular storm expressionistically illustrated with the help of a Nina Simone recording—she’ll make another dramatic contribution later—and the energy and artistry never flag. Three key roles are superbly filled. Britney Simpson’s Ariel is a marvel of physical sprightliness and musical and emotional heft. The same could be said of Jason O’Connell’s Caliban, a damaged monster with a poetic soul and a voice that ranges from beastly growl to soaring song. And Howard W. Overshown powerfully embodies the complex Prospero, struggling within himself between violence and mercy, revenge and forgiveness. Shakespeare’s ruminations on the evanescence of experience are magically given life on this fantastic island.
Gary Perkins as Bliss and Imami Branch as Dream in Theatre Alliance’s “The Blackest Battle.” Photo courtesy of Theatre Alliance.
Psalmayene 24’s latest production is “The Blackest Battle,” a parable set to a love story set in the near future where America has gone through a second civil war after reparations were finally made to Black people. Black people live in a territory called Chief County where they fight against the cascading effects of slavery — Black-on-Black gun violence, rivalries, and a drug called Hope, which is psychologically addictive (it’s some combination of technology and plant-based which seems to take hold through music).
Go to the Theatre Alliance website and buy a ticket. Psalmayene 24 has given us entrée into a world we need to see and hear and feel — now.
Psalmayene 24 has built his story on the bones of “Romeo & Juliet,” with a hearty nod to “West Side Story.” At one point, even under the hip-hop background, I could hear echoes of “Gee Officer Krupe” in the dialogue. It is a clever homage.
Only in Chief County, our two rival gangs are two rival music entrepreneurs, vying for top billing and away out of gun dealing, and more. In this stripped-down, fast-paced version, the action coalesces when Dream (Imami Branch) meets Bliss (Gary Perkins) and he persuades her to spend a couple of hours with him while he shows her the underpass and introduces her to Hope.
The one thing her posse won’t allow is using Hope — the leader of their group’s mother died from it. But when Dream tries it with Bliss, she sees a world of possibility for Black people to move forward and unleash their creativity, minds, and souls.
Unfortunately, life isn’t that kind. While Bliss and Dream sit under the Underpass (Branch and Perkins have a delectable chemistry together), they see a wall of names painted in little white-rimmed rectangles — the names of everyone dead by gun violence for that year. The names are actually of those who have died by gun violence in Washington, DC this past year, and it’s a harsh, unescapable reality. In “The Blackest Battle,” someone will die of gun violence between the rival groups, but it won’t be Bliss or Dream. It will be basically a bystander, an innocent who came upon them and offered some advice.
Tightly directed by Raymond O. Caldwell, the production team does a masterful job of blending the graphic art (Wesley Clark, Camilla King and Maliah Stokes), background art (Rodney “Buck” Herring), props (Amy Kellett), lighting (Dylan Uremovich), sound (Matthew M. Nielson), and photography (Kelly Colburn, who also did the video editing). Animation by Jeremy Bennett, Deja Collins, Dylan Uremovich, and Visual FX artists Kelly Colburn, Deja Collins, Jonathan Dahm Robertson, and Dylan Uremovich bring visual verve and punch to the music, dance, and dialogue.
But it’s not cartoonish, in the sense of being cute or at a safe remove. This is a visceral show that demands the audience acknowledge and think about the deleterious and on-going effects of centuries of abuse, cruelty, and dehumanization that have led to names on an underpass. The show makes these points with force and vigor because these people have basically died in a war, but where is the memorial honoring their sacrifices?
Go to the Theatre Alliance website and buy a ticket. Psalmayene 24 has given us entrée into a world we need to see and hear and feel — now.
This is an ambitious show, and I’m sorry I didn’t see the original conception when it was presented at the Kennedy Center’s “Page to Stage.”
Running Time: Approximately 90 minutes without intermission.
Advisory: Adult language and drug use. For mature teens and older.
“The Blackest Battle” streams through the end of August 2021 from Theatre Alliance, Washington, DC. For more information, please click here.
Read the full article by Mary Ann Johnson from MD Theatre Guide here.
