- OTHER MEDIA
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- review in the San Francisco Bay Guardian
- by Robert Avila
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- Two welcome and long-overdue Bay Area theatrical premieres coincided
this month in particularly successful bids to break open the tyrannical,
homogenous narrative of American history using the perspective(s) of African
American experience.
Unmaking and remaking history is at the core of Pulitzer Prize winning
playwright Suzan-Lori Parks's elliptical narrative collage The Death of
the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, now playing in a remarkable
production by San Francisco's Cutting Ball Theater. Death of the Last Black
Man is something like a three-dimensional poem to which theatrical resources
are brought to bear by an artist with an exceptional instinct for the possibilities
of the form. At the same time, its knack for tapping the rhythms, musicality,
and metaphoric potency of vernacular speech, which recalls the stage work
of Ntozake Shange, shapes its structure in ways equally reminiscent of
a jazz score.
Artistic director Rob Melrose's beautifully pitched staging of Parks's
meditation on history and the African American experience is an altogether
impressive achievement. A truly fine ensemble cast imbues the play's representational
figures -- among them Black Man with Watermelon (Myers Clark), Black Woman
with Fried Drum Stick (Allison L. Payne), and Old Man River Jordan (David
Westley Skillman) -- with humor and urgency, lending palpable life to a
work at once challenging in its gnomic structure and joyful to behold in
its sublime ordering and reordering of images, ideas, and words.
Enveloped by Liliana Duque Piñeiro's superbly earthbound
yet ethereal-looking stage design, the cast presents a series of iconic
characters drawn from the heavily fraught sign-soup of the culture at large,
including everything from stereotype to the defiant figure of Richard Wright's
Bigger Thomas (Dwight Huntsman). These characters engage in a loose, fractured
colloquium of protestation, remonstration, declaration, and musing that
calls to mind a jazz orchestra emerging from the cacophonous echo chamber
of history. But then "history," as Parks once said, "is
time that won't quit."
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