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Small-scale shows highlight actors’ abilities
(by Bob Wilcox - February 03, 2010)
The Crown Heights section of Brooklyn has a population made up of a sizable minority of ultra-orthodox Jews and a majority of African Americans and immigrants from the Caribbean. In 1991, one of the Jewish residents lost control of his car and careened onto the sidewalk, where the car hit and killed a young black boy. Three hours later, a group of vengeful young black men surrounded and stabbed to death a rabbinical student. Rumors flew. Anger boiled over. Several days of rioting followed.
Actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith interviewed people in both communities in Crown Heights, as well as prominent individuals from outside the area. She edited the interviews and put them together as a theatrical piece she called Fires in the Mirror. Then she performed them. She was, by all accounts, brilliant.
Now Mustard Seed Theatre is presenting Fires in the Mirror in the Fontbonne University Black Box Theatre. Playing the dozen or more individuals in the piece are two actors, not one. If they are not brilliant, they are very, very good. Each person, male or female, black or white, young or old, gets clearly and cleanly depicted and distinguished from the others.
The two actors, Michelle Hand and Rory Lipede, receive terrific help from their director, Lori Adams, from the accessories provided for each of the characters by costume designer Kirsten Wylder, from Courtney Sanazaro’s set of a city broken by rioters, and from Michael Sullivan’s lights. Especially helpful — and often moving — is the sound and video design of Kareem Deanes, with the video seen on TV sets perched on either side of the stage as if tossed there by the rioters.
This material certainly has its fascination, and the work of the two actors is impressive. But these incidents have been so thoroughly reported and studied in the 20 years since they happened that what is said now seems almost commonplace rather than revelatory. Certainly there is drama in the material. But it’s presented as personal statements delivered to us in the audience rather than as the declarations of antagonists dramatically confronting each other. The drama is, at best, indirect. And a little too often for comfort, I found it hard to understand what Hand and Lipede were saying as they took on the peculiarities of the ways of speaking characteristic of those they were playing. Some words weren’t clear.
Only one actor takes the small stage in the cabaret space at the Kranzberg Arts Center, where Upstream Theater is mounting its current production. And he, too, is talking to us. But he is really confronting an antagonist. That antagonist is the world and his place in it. He plays the bass violin in an orchestra. The instrument, he says, is the very foundation of the orchestra. But it gets no respect. Nor does he. For an hour he pours out his pain and anger and his love and hate for his huge instrument that lodges inescapably with him in his small living room — an ingeniously contrived set by Jason Coale, with lights by Joseph W. Clapper and costume by Michele Siler.
In The Double Bass, playwright Patrick Süskind makes this musician a vehicle for all our feelings of injustice and inferiority. Director Philip Boehm has cast a black actor (J. Samuel Davis) in the role, which adds extra layers of meaning. Davis is alive every moment — funny, angry, suffering, brave, ridiculous and noble. It’s a great performance and a joy to watch.
• Upstream Theater’s The Double Bass continues through Feb. 14. Order tickets at 863-4999. Mustard Seed Theatre’s Fires in the Mirror runs through Feb. 7, with tickets available at 719-8060.
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