Page 2 of 3
While Going, Going, Gone may fail in its desire to persuade us of its scientific and philosophical concepts, it traveled at the speed of light toward a new vision of theater. The warp-vector sound design by Darron West and the spare black-and-white set by Neil Patel combined with Bogart's voraciously resourceful staging to create a galactic domestic scene. Stripped of the emotional blueprint of a conventional script, the actors were forced to plumb the very depths of physical and vocal expression. Shifting seamlessly between impassioned utterance and abstract gesture, they worked together in a combustible mix. Drawing their fire from old-fashioned human friction, the actors often relied on the comic parallels between science and sex. "Things on a small scale behave nothing like things on a large scale," the "Martha" character (Ellen Lauren) leers at her feckless husband (Tom Nelis). During an illicit embrace with her male guest (Stephen Webber), she rumbles, "Mathematics is to physics what masturbation is to sex, eh?" Though the actors' virtuosity became its own pleasure, one wondered how much more powerful the performances might have been had they been built off of a more emotionally-grounded script.
In the end, as the "Martha" character begins reciting from Genesis with the "George" character interjecting obtuse scientific counterpoints, it becomes glaringly clear just how impoverished the language of science currently is as a source of meaning for the ordinary person. Like our own daily lives, the Bible's story of creation is about love, loneliness, and desire. Perhaps someday, human beings will breathe deeply at the invocation of the Heisenberg Principle. But for now, Going, Going, Gone doesn't persuade that theater is a viable forum for the transmittal of every form of knowledge. This doesn't in any way demean theater; it just emphasizes its distinctiveness. After all, if Stephen Hawking had set out to formulate an equation based on Albee's three-act play, chances are, he would have missed the point altogether.
-- Carol Lloyd
Night and 'Day
Lady Sings the Blues (The Flip Side). Directed by Sean Vaughn Scott and Winston Williams. Written by Mona Scott. Starring Gerri Harris, Nina Causey, Pheleta Santos, Cheryl Robinson, and Amber Harris. At the Black Repertory Group Theater, 3201 Adeline St. (at Ashby) in Berkeley, through May 25. Call (510) 652-2120.
Billie Holiday's autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, reads like a sassy testament, colorful and ready-to-dramatize, starting with her girlhood in Baltimore, where she scrubbed steps at a whorehouse for the favor of hearing records on the neighborhood's only Victrola. You'd think that putting it onstage would be easier than reproducing the smoldering textures of her songs. But the Black Repertory Group, in Lady Sings the Blues (The Flip Side), ends up using the story as a tottering framework to showcase some fine singing by Gerri Harris, Pheleta Santos, Cheryl Robinson, and Amber Harris. From the ashes of stiltedly-read book passages and rote, wooden scenes, each woman manages to evoke a living Lady Day with elegant versions of songs like "The Man I Love" and "God Bless the Child."
The show starts with a passage about Billie's parents' wedding. The curtain opens on what's basically a wedding snapshot, a posing bride and groom. Nothing happens and the curtain closes. Then there's a song -- "Lady Sings the Blues" -- by Gerri Harris, and the scene shifts to the whorehouse in Baltimore. Amber Harris is the youngest actor in the cast and maybe the most talented: she plays a willful, precocious young Billie asking the madam for work and imitating the prostitutes until she gets chased home by her mother. Pamela Flax (as her mother) and Phyllis Williams (as the madam) are also good actors, doing their best with a flimsy script. The scene leads into a smooth version of "Love For Sale," and while Gerri Harris sings the cast provides a staged background for the music. These backgrounds -- the whorehouse and, later, Jerry's Club in New York -- accomplish what the Repertory has set out to do, which is paint a staged, musical portrait of Holiday.
The weakest scene is a literal take on "Strange Fruit," Holiday's song about lynching. The poem she adapted for this song reminded Holiday of her father, who died of a hemorrhage in Dallas after being turned away from several hospitals for baldly racist reasons. Gerri Harris does a beautiful job with the song, but the lynching onstage isn't a scene from the actual racism that Holiday "encountered relative to her music," as the program promises, and it's played with unconvincing grief, which just makes it awkward.
But the scenes in Jerry's Club are interesting and funny. The best sequence shows Holiday trying to audition as a dancer. She fails, and as a last resort tries to sing. Amber Harris holds down these young-Billie parts with a confident, natural style; she also has a powerful voice that she hasn't quite learned to control. The other women, in no particular order, take turns as the adult Billie, and by the time Pheleta Santos appears as the third polished and warm-voiced edition of the mature Lady Day it's both obvious and beside the point that the show exists for the songs.
