- OTHER MEDIA
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- Death of the Last Black Man Needs Cutting and Clarifying
By Linda Ayres-Frederick
- review in the SF Bay Times
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- Even the best of writers can create less than brilliant work. Suzan-Lori
Parks, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Top Dog/Under Dog, is known for breaking
rules in dramatic structure. She may even have been called by Tony Kushner
“The best playwright writing in the English language.” But in
The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, now showing
at the EXIT on Taylor, produced by The Cutting Ball Theater, Parks’
most recent experimental work is less of a play than an extended eleven-voice
choral poem that borrows from a number of poetic forms — Villanelle
and Sestina to name but two. Lines are repeated like a school marm drilling
an African-American history lesson whose subject matter covers centuries
of suffering an us/them sensibility, where the “us” characters
are onstage and the “them” are abstract offstage antagonists.
- Time itself is a subject dealt with (and gets extended) by using characters,
costumes, and set pieces that span several centuries. Abstract concepts
of time get interwoven into the language which (through repetition) become
like themes in a musical score. The lengthy title is one of those many
repeated lines, as is the line “Write that down” — a device
poets occasionally use to maintain the consciousness in the listener’s
ear that they are indeed hearing a created work. After the seventh or so
repetition, however, even the actors seemed challenged to find a fresh
delivery. Did the author run out of things to say or just consider the
audience to have I.Q..’s lower than that of a village idiot?
- As directed by Rob Melrose, the eleven characters, all multi-talented
Bay Area performers, didn’t have much to do physically or room to
move on the wood-planked stage (set designed by Liliana Duque Pineiro)
filled with a variety of seats (school desk, wooden electric chair, throne
among them) from periods of history dating back to the Egypt of Queen-then-Pharaoh
Hatshepsut (LeNeac Weathersby). Black Man with Watermelon (Myers Clark)
and Black Woman with Fried Drumstick (Allison L. Payne) had more duets
together that implied the return — after a forced separation —
to a relationship that existed before he e “died-ed.” They shared
a simple wooden bench. An intriguing bit of stage business by Woman with
Fried Drumstick consisted of dropping over a dozen eggs one by one on the
floor (but if these characters are so poor, how can they waste all those
eggs?).
- The use of a hanging tree branch with noose around his neck was an
effective image when Man with Watermelon repeatedly raised it over his
own head during one of his speeches. Other characters named from history—
Before Columbus (Robert Henry Johnson) and Old Man River Jordan (David
Westley Skillman) — told stories that had something to do with time
before and after r “they” — presumably the implied people
in power most likely white man — took charge. (What a shame not to
incorporate Johnson’s extraordinary dance talent in the production.)
There were occasional outbursts of f “Hambone, Hambone” sung
enthusiastically by the ensemble and lots of clever double entendres. A
particular distinction was made between when the world was “roun’”
and when the world became “rounduh” by Queen-then-Pharaoh Hatshepsut.
- There is no doubt that Suzan-Lori Parks has an imagination filled with
vivid images of the black experience, but by attempting to cover too much
ground in too many styles with too many characters, Parks does not imbue
The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World with either a
cohesive sense or enough clarity to serve that imagination. And while the
piece fulfills The Cutting Ball Theater’s admirable mission to do
experimental plays with emphasis on language and images, and is performed
here by a tightly knit ensemble, it’s not surprising that outside
its NYC premiere, Death has received very few productions.
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