"Harlem in Paris"
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| Stars range from 5-1. |
For its current offering of FOREVER, a one-woman play
by and with Dael Orlandersmith, the New York Theatre Workshop has cleared the entire
expanse of the spacious, proscenium-less stage area to reveal the brick walls
surrounding it, with only a narrow band of wood running horizontally across the
walls and continuing through the auditorium. Decorating the portion onstage are
photographs related to Ms. Orlandersmith’s family, while the auditorium area
contains small notes placed there by audience members responding to a program
insert (reprinted below).
The only scenery (designed by Takeshi Kata) on the
roomy stage, which seems rather extensive for a one-woman play, is a wooden
platform with a table and a couple of chairs. Ms. Orlandersmith, a hefty,
impressive-looking woman (born in 1959, she’ll tell us)—wearing
a loose, black, caftan-like garment over black tights (costume by Kaye Voyce),
her hair parted in the middle with numerous shoulder-length braids—manages to
fill the space with the warmth of her presence and the strength of her
performance. Neel Keller moves the actress through the space with discretion,
and Mary Louise Geiger’s sensitive lighting does wonders to make the work
visually stimulating.
After the writer-actress enters and welcomes us to her
show, she begins her memoir in Paris’s famed Pére Lachaise cemetery,
where so many famed artists are buried, and moves backward into her own life
growing up in New York’s Harlem. Tying her Parisian and New York experiences
together is her search for family; on the one hand are the dead writers and
musicians she visits in Paris, the artistic parents she claims “helped us give
birth to ourselves”; on the other there’s Beula, her late mother, who was both a
powerful influence on and psychological obstacle to her development. (Her
accomplishments, which include being a 2002 Pulitzer finalist, are not trumpeted, though.). A
program note, however, reveals that “she blended fact and fiction” in the
writing, which makes one hesitate about how much credence to give the details
in her recounting.
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| Dael Orlandersmith. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Ms. Orlandersmith’s story, like those of most of our
lives, is interesting, and it certainly has its dramatic highlights, including
the highly graphic account of a rape she endured at 14, but there’s nothing
truly extraordinary in it. Girl from Harlem overcomes drunken parent’s abuse
and becomes moderately successful artist. What’s exceptional is the way she
weaves her material into a compelling narrative, embracing the audience in her
memories, particularly those picturing her enduring love-hate relationship with
her abusive, chain-smoking, alcoholic mother, who gave weekly Saturday night
drinking parties for her friends. She speaks directly to the audience in the first person, now and then briefly changing voices to suggest someone
else. It’s a straightforward performance that, apart from the honesty with
which she conveys her feelings, avoids the kind of tour de force versatility
such works often count on.
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| Dael Orlandersmith. Photo:Joan Marcus. |
Ms. Orlandersmith informs us that her father died in
1963, when she was four, and for much of the play we assume she lived alone
with her mother, but late in the play she throws off a comment about “that man
who raised me.” What man, I’d like to know, since no man other than her father has
been mentioned in a paternal role, and it’s only after her mother’s death in
1989 that she even discovers that this mystery man was not her biological
father. Also, we learn only by inference that her mother—who came from South
Carolina—was an educated woman (she recited the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar
and was reading East of Eden when she
died), but we don’t know what level of education she possessed, or even what
she did for a living; we have to assume that Ms. Orlandersmith grew up in
middle-class comfort, despite her home being piss-stained, and stinking from
tobacco and Scotch. We get a sense of this when she recalls a poverty-stricken girl
she befriended as a child being rejected by her mother because of apparent
class and economic differences.
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| Dael Orlandersmith. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
In her teens, Ms. Orlandersmith finally found her
pathway out of Harlem when she began hanging out in Greenwich Village,
frequenting clubs like CBGB, and otherwise becoming independent of her mother’s
influence. Eventually, she achieved a life goal and went to Paris, a place her
mother, who dreamed of going, never visited, and where she thinks her mother
would have mocked her for being out of place.
The Pére Lachaise material, during which she mentions
in passing many of the greats who rest there, concentrates mainly on honoring
the memories of singer Jim Morrison of The Doors and ex-pat African-American
novelist Richard Wright. Morrison, of course, is the more surprising influence;
Ms. Orlandersmith even recalls being harassed by a black man for carrying a
Doors album while walking through Harlem. To his “Listenin to that white shit/I
should beat your ass,” she responded, “yeah come on motherfucker.” She was 11
at the time. Racial issues, though, take a back seat to more universal ones; in
fact, Ms. Orlandersmith notes the potent impact on her of two men of Irish
ancestry, the playwright Eugene O’Neill and a cop who comforted her after her
rape.
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| Dael Orlandersmith. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Following her mother’s death, Ms. Orlandersmith learns
things about her she had never known, an experience many of us have shared. My
wife only just discovered something about a close, departed relation that could make a playlet of its own. We all carry secrets that may
or may never come to light.
Ms. Orlandersmith, whose play is
essentially a struggle for reconciliation with her mother, manages to finally find it in Paris, and to realize, over Jim Morrison’s grave, that she and Beula will be there
forever. Truth or fiction? Does it matter?
FOREVER
New York Theatre Workshop
79 East 4th Street, NYC
Through May 31
FOREVER
New York Theatre Workshop
79 East 4th Street, NYC
Through May 31