- OTHER MEDIA
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- Fate and fable converge while Jesus moonwalks
- Marin Independent Journal (March 24, 2010) by Sam Hurwitt
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- When you go to see Marcus Gardley's "... And Jesus Moonwalks the
Mississippi" - which you should - it feels like what you're witnessing
is not just a fascinating new play, but an important one. Parts of it are
so dense that it might take repeat viewings to drink and parse all of the
rich, lyrical language, but that's not a flaw either in the writing or
the delivery. Suffused with metaphor and mixed mythology, it's more challenging
than your average new play, and it's a challenge that's richly rewarded
in the Cutting Ball Theater and Playwrights Foundation coproduction at
the Exit on Taylor in San Francisco.
"Jesus Moonwalks" is set in Mississippi and Louisiana during
the Civil War. A lynched African-American man named Damascus is immediately
resurrected as a woman named Demeter, who only has three days to find her
daughter Po'em and transmit her song before she has to return to death.
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- Not all of the 32-year-old Oakland native's dialogue is as thick with
poetry as the intriguing opening - much of it is funny and down-to-earth,
though always with an awareness that the characters are caught in fate
and fable, something much larger than life. In a mesmerizing staging by
Playwrights Foundation artistic director Amy Mueller, the cast is marvelous
from top to bottom.
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- Aldo Billingslea sashays and sasses as Demeter but carries himself
with the brawny heft of the man she was before, giving him a powerful male
and female presence at the same time. Nicole C. Julien is formidable as
Miss Ssippi, who is both the river and the play's muse and also serves
as a Greek chorus along with her three backup singers Rebecca Frank, Halili
Knox and Erica Richardson, in matching blue dresses like bridesmaids to
her bride.
San Rafael's AlterTheater cofounder Jeanette Harrison is delightfully flighty
as Southern belle Cadence Verse, seemingly a champagne-soaked flibbertigibbet
- "she may play drunk, but she drinks everything in." Erika A.
McCrary and Sarah Mitchell are endearingly childish as her two daughters
of indeterminate (but the same) age: Free, a dainty girlie girl, her face
made up in white powder to hide her blackness, and Blanche, a skinny white
tomboy who likes to play soldier. They've been raised to think of themselves
as twins and to ignore the fact that they really don't look anything alike.
- With wings of twigs, David Westley Skillman commands attention. He
is eloquent and powerfully voiced as the Great Tree that resurrects Damascus
and awfully funny as Jesus, Free's invisible friend whom hardly anyone
else can see, like a holy Snuffleupagus.
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- The play's resident trickster and fool, Brer Bit (as in Br'er Rabbit),
isn't funny nor meant to be. He's amusing at first, when he hides his keen
intelligence and hatred behind a veneer of ignorant servility as the "house
Negro," but he quickly becomes sinister in his all-consuming desire
to kill the family, take over the household and paint the white house black.
Slapping a hambone rhythm on his legs and chest, Martin F. Grizzell Jr.
gives a dizzyingly antic, frantic performance as Bit, with his body language
making the feeling of a hare apparent rather than any leporine accoutrements,
besides the high feather in his green top hat.
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- Meanwhile, the Confederate deserter and all-around scoundrel Jean Verse
(Marin Academy theater codirector David Sinaiko with weaselly charm) is
on his way home with a captured Union bugle boy (a callow Zac Shuman) on
a leash as his pet pig.
- Michael Locher's wood-plank set gives the play a rustic feel, and Callie
Floor's comely costumes capture the period and timelessness at the same,
well, time. Cliff Caruthers' sound design speaks volumes, from the slow
creak of the noose to the crackle of flame.
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- With chorus member Richardson as musical director, the cast spins knockout
a cappella choral renditions of appropriate spirituals from "Down
to the River to Pray" to "Down by the Riverside," mostly
sung by Miss Ssippi and her Mississippettes (who aren't actually called
that), but sometimes by the full cast so sweetly that you can't help but
be swept up.
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- And Jesus does indeed moonwalk on the Mississippi to a beatbox version
of "Billie Jean," anachronistic as it may be. Why? Well, he's
Jesus. Are you going to tell him he can't?
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