- OTHER MEDIA
|
- Review in the SF Weekly March 31, 2010 (Chris Jensen)
-
- Since the early 1990s, just about any American playwright of even moderate
ambition has dreamed of writing the next Angels in America. Tony Kushner's
two-part "gay fantasia" made its world premiere at San Francisco's
Eureka Theatre Company in 1991, eventually proceeding to Broadway and back-to-back
Tony Awards. It is the preeminent play of its generation — unapologetically
political, devastatingly articulate — and stands as a rare triumph
of that rarest of oxymorons, the intimate epic.
-
- Marcus Gardley's ... and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi, a new play
coproduced by the Cutting Ball Theater and the Playwrights Foundation,
is very much in the Kushner tradition. (I'm not just pulling that out of
my ass: Rob Melrose, Cutting Ball's artistic director, invites the comparison
in the playbill's introductory notes.) Set during the Civil War, steeped
in biblical and mythological allusion, Gardley's play applies a sweeping
vision of American history to the story of a very dysfunctional family.
Like Kushner's work, it combines a kind of high-toned mysticism with an
earthy sense of humor, and it brims with energy, poetry, and clever ideas.
-
- It's also a bit of a mess. A play this ambitious is bound to need a
lot of development before it's ready for prime time, and Jesus Moonwalks
has seen its share of workshops around the country. Even so, its current
manifestation is a few workshops short of a satisfying production.
-
- The story concerns an escaped slave named Damascus (Aldo Billingslea)
who's searching for his missing daughter, Po' Em, during the Siege of Vicksburg
in May 1863. Damascus falls victim to a lynching, which doesn't kill him,
but instead transforms him into a woman named Demeter. He then proceeds
to the Verse Plantation, where a white woman named Cadence (Jeanette Harrison)
is raising her daughter, Blanche (Sarah Mitchell), alongside a former slave
girl who thinks she's white (Erika A. McCrary). Before long — and
for reasons that still aren't entirely clear to me — we're treated
to the presence of an African-American Jesus (David Westley Skillman),
who breaks into a moonwalk whenever the other characters sing "Billie
Jean." Narrating all of this is a chorus led by Miss Ssippi (Nicole
C. Julien), a high-spirited embodiment of the river that flows through
Vicksburg.
-
- At times, these disparate elements come together in startling and memorable
ways, as when Jesus joins the Verse family for an unexpectedly goofy meal.
("Jesus loves grits," our Lord and Savior explains.) More often
than not, however, Gardley has a tendency to abandon ideas before they've
fully developed, leaving the play's dense allegorical structure in need
of a lot of clarification and refinement.
-
- I pity the person who feels the need to parse the symbolic universe
that Gardley creates. We begin with the biblical story of Saul's conversion
on the road to Damascus — a story that's curiously paralleled with
lynching — before we're booted over to the mythological story of Demeter
and Persephone. By the time we encounter a messianic Michael Jackson, it's
tough to think of any coherent explanatory framework that might account
for what's happening onstage. There are simply too many symbols and portents
struggling for attention.
-
- Dramaturg Nakissa Etemad classifies the play as a kind of "gumbo,"
which I guess is a delicious way of saying "pastiche." But if
we go with the food analogy, I can think of a number of ingredients whose
absence would improve this particular stew. First off, the characters'
names could be less cute ("Po' Em" and "Verse" should
be among the first to go). At least one subplot — the one involving
a borderline sadomasochistic relationship between a Confederate soldier
(David Sinaiko) and a Yankee (Zac Schuman) — fails to add significant
interest. I could've done without the overlong monologue from the guy dressed
as a tree. And the play occasionally descends into schmaltzy territory,
as when McCrary's character embraces her true skin color after seeing her
reflection at the bottom of a pail of water.
-
- Some of these issues might have been less problematic with help from
a stronger cast. Julien gives the show's best performance as the sassy
Miss Ssippi, and Billingslea helps ground the play with his no-nonsense
interpretation of Damascus and Demeter. But not everyone fares so well.
Few things distract me more than poor dialect work, and some of the actors'
Southern drawls are hit-and-miss. Gardley's intense lyricism, which seems
overripe at the moment, might also fare better with a more seasoned group
of actors who could handle it more nimbly.
-
- Director Amy Mueller does a respectable job of keeping the production
on track, but it's a bumpy ride all the same — try as she may, the
second act is too erratic to maintain interest. The one element of this
production that shouldn't change at all, though, is Michael Locher's set.
Built on bare planks and festooned with colorful buttons that double as
stars, it's a striking piece of work that's perfectly suited to the material.
-
- For all its mythopoetic ambitions, ... and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi
is a long way from being the next Angels in America — though the same
could be said of just about anything written in English. A more reasonable
assessment would say that Gardley has concocted an oversized pot of gumbo
that could use fewer ingredients and more time on the stove.
|
|