“Guardian Angels”
Onstage, Renata Hinrichs, playwright/actress/
dancer, looks
about 40 in the simple, plaid, jumper-style dress (designed by Deshon Elem Delta) she
wears in Random Acts. Actually, she’s in her mid-50s, since the autobiographical story she tells in her sweet, but not particularly newsworthy, one-woman memory play, is of being in first grade when Martin Luther King, Jr., was
assassinated in 1968.
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| Renata Hinrichs. Photo: Mitch Traphagen, |
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| Renata Hinrichs. Photo: Mitch Traphagen. |
Hinrichs tells her tale on a bare stage backed only by a vertical
flat of multicolored squares (designed by Chika Shimizu), with only a bench on
which to now and then sit. In a program note, she declares that New York’s post-9/11
turmoil jogged her memories of Chicago’s civil rights disturbances following Dr. King’s death, leading to other recollections that she subsequently wrote down
and performed.
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| Renata Hinrichs. Photo: Mitch Traphagen. |
Speaking to us both in her adult and childhood voices, this
talented artist smoothly jumps from character to character, including her
parents, her schoolmates, a boy she dated, and so on, altering her speech and body
movements to do so. Occasionally, little Renata, an aspiring ballerina, bursts
out dancing. In one bit, she performs in her room along with a recording of
Julie Andrews, her idol, singing “The Sound of Music,” a choreographically hammy
version of a little girl dreaming her heart out to her favorite song.
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| Renata Hinrichs. Photo: Mitch Traphagen. |
As that number suggests, much of the Random Acts provides the nostalgic background for a recreation of
Hinrichs’s early life as the daughter of a Lutheran minister and his prim and proper
wife. Hinrichs’s account describes the events after the family moved in 1966
from Boston to Chicago, where her father, replacing a racist minister, was
assigned to a white church on the South Side, very close to Ashland Avenue, a
street dividing white and black neighborhoods, rife with racial tensions.
Her father is an idealistic liberal of great integrity whose
resistance to racism and “God loves everybody” philosophy alienates some congregants,
as when people walk out when a black baby is baptized. Her mother is a woman tensely
aware of the need to keep her family and home under spic and span control, the kind
who constantly warns Renata to behave or get “the living daylights” beat out of
her.
But, once she’s enrolled in public school, even in
kindergarten, little Renata can’t avoid being bullied by resentful black kids. One
painful incident is resolved by the intercession of an older black boy whose
identity she never learns. When she tells her dad about it, he comforts her,
not only by trying to explain why people are biased against people of other
colors, but by calling the boy a “guardian angel,” such as we all have in times
of need.
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| Renata Hinrichs. Photo: Mitch Traphagen. |
Such theological platitudes may not resolve questions like
why Dr. King is later murdered, but, as an explanation for the influence of random
acts of kindness, it nonetheless remains important to Renata.
Hinrichs also describes the trauma of the racial violence
that erupted in Chicago following Dr. King’s death, which seared her for life. Nonetheless,
she remained so colorblind that, in 1978, she appears not to have realized the
potential for trouble in her relationship with Willy, the captain of her high
school football team and editor of the school paper.
When she went to pick him up at his home for their Homecoming
Dance date, his mother’s nasty, “Willy, there’s some white girl here for you,” was
never to be forgotten. Nor was Willy’s own rudeness toward her that night; his bad
behavior needn’t be interpreted through a racial filter but it does allow for a
touching moment later in Renata’s life when Facebook appears on the scene, providing
a nice touch of sentiment that displays the actress’s emotional depth.
Director Jessi D. Hill serves the play well, both in her
staging, which makes good use of the small space, and by her incorporation of a
rather extensive sound design (by Matt Otto), using pop (“Downtown,” “Sitting
on the Dock of the Bay,” etc.), and church music, and considerably varied
lighting design by Daisy Long.
Perhaps the most interesting slant the material takes is its
concern with a white girl being on the receiving end of racist attitudes, and
of a child’s loss of innocence but not her faith in human goodness. Random Acts raises valid issues, and nicely
captures Hinrichs’s recall of a specific time and place. As drama, though, it’s
rather thin, like the threads of a spider web, lovely to look at but so fragile
it doesn’t take much effort for it to crumble.
The Barrow Group
312 W. 36th St., NYC
Through March 2
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