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"What Happened in Boston, Willie"

Reviews of Current Productions

note: entire contents copyright 2012 by Barbara Lewis

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"The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity"

Reviewed by Barbara Lewis

It’s definitely a crowd pleaser. The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Diety, which opened the last week of July at the Calderwood Pavilion in the Boston Center for the Arts under the banner of Company One, which is quickly becoming one of the most exciting theatrical outfits in town, knows how to emotionally connect with an audience. The stage is a boxing ring and the wrestlers are barely clad with their oiled muscles rippling and dancing. The humor is broad and incisive. Kristoffer Diaz, the Obie-winning playwright, knows the narrative world of televised wrestling, and he brings its quick jab thrills to the stage. Shawn LaCount, the director, brings it all together inside the red ropes with racy verve. And all the actors (Ricardo Engermann (as Mace); Chris Leon (as Chad); Peter Brown (as Olson); Jake Athyal (as Vigneshwar Paduar) and Mike Webb (as Billy Heartland) are a delight to hear and watch.
An underdog tells the story. Macedonio Guerra, a last name that means war, was born Puerto Rican and poor in the South Bronx. As a boy, he fell hard for wrestling, which he thought of as an art form. So Mace – notice that almost everything here is reduced to the short byte and the quick read -- grew up to live his dream, but not on the winning side. He is the jobber, making lesser talents shine like stars.

Then he sees a chance to push through, which comes in the guise of a facile ball-playing South Asian from Brooklyn who uses crotch grabbing as verbal spice, runs after any girl he sees, and gets billed by the thin, driven, suit-wearing, money-hungry wrestling manager as a brown fundamentalist Paki Muslim terrorist. So all the boxers, save one, aka Billy Heartland & Old Glory, are incarnations of black or brown, and Olson, the money man who calls all the shots, is white, probably of Scandinavian heritage. Such is the way of the democratic world where winners and losers are the biggest story in town, stirring to fever pitch good red American blood, all mixed together, each rising or falling to its right level.

Chad Deity, the star, is black but his days are numbered even while the gold belt circling his waist as he makes his pectorals dance is big and flashy. His story is old. Which of the up-and-coming brown guys will replace him, nudge him out of the way, pin him to the mat, and take over his championship glory? The whole set-up is metaphoric of the power dynamic in America heavy with suited money-men, unclad gladiators, and eager crowds in the seats demanding to be sated with circus and bread.

Oh yes, there are raisins in this mix, plump raisins that were once grapes picked by Mexicans. Chad, which is also the name of a very poor central African country where the Sahara is located, is very much a new-age immigrant American saga of the arena, with anyone and everyone emerging into the public eye to vie and pummel for favor. By shortening the name of the play to Chad, I am following the reduction game that is prevalent in the world of pitting arms and backs against the odds and the floor and seeing who survives to fight another day. It’s a virtual parade of nations entering the mouths and minds of these characters who regularly reference Mexicans, Dominicans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Indians, not the native kind, Filipinos, and others. I wonder if Diaz ever read the Battle Royale scene in Ellison’s novel, The Invisible Man, which posits that America’s main entertainment is watching two men of dark complexions fight for the titillation of the fairer than fair onlookers, with the viewing of this contest staged for their delectation and thus confirming their superiority and privilege.

The payoff is that at least one, in due time, will be utterly vanquished, and both are diminished in the process. Are we regurgitating that old saga for a new generation, with a somewhat more piquant sauce? And doesn’t it all, in the long run, go back to the Romans who found the pulp of their essence vitiated by a surfeit of gaming.

Rather than being accused of over thinking the healthy, ever engaging pulse and throb of the competitive urge, that builds muscle, let me elaborate on my beginning. This is well-written, well-acted, extremely well-directed fare that keeps you on the edge of your seat and stirs your mind too. We are looking at ourselves looking at a reflection of ourselves and what could be more stimulating and fulfilling than that? Kristoffer Diaz, the playwright, is a clever one to watch. And the Company One brand thrills once again.

"The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity" (27 July - 25 August)

COMPANY ONE

@ Boston Center for The Arts, 539 Tremont Street, BOSTON MA

1(617)933-8600

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THE THEATER MIRROR, New England's LIVE Theater Guide

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Breaking Through the Bottleneck: Theater Makers in teh Black Community Change Dynamics in Boston by Akiba Abaka

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SELECT CATEGORY Ideas, Practices, Bright Spots Podcasts #NEWPLAY TV New Play Map Happenings and Announcements City Series Regular Columns

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• Ideas, Practices, Bright Spots
• Podcasts
• #NEWPLAY TV
• New Play Map
• Happenings and Announcements
• City Series
• Regular Columns

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Breaking Through the Bottleneck: Theater Makers in the Black Community Congregate to Change Dynamics in Boston by Akiba Abaka

July 25, 2012 | BY Akiba Abaka

On Tuesday, July 17, eighteen theater makers in Boston’s black community gathered at the Calderwood Pavilion to reverse the energies expelling them to the edges. They gathered to change the landscape of audiences who experience their work, to change how they communicate with each other, to change their lack of presence in the field, and most importantly to change themselves.

The significance of the eighteen people in the room was magnanimous even if this number may be considered small by some measure. Everyone in attendance had self-selected to be there—followed an inspiration, a frustration, a need for more work, more stages, more audience, more youth, more scholars, more funding, more support, more community—essentially a need for each other.

As the door to the Arts Resource Room in the Calderwood Pavilion opened, I was greeted by an all-star cast of Boston’s black theater makers:

• John Adekoje (Filmmaker/Playwright/Educator)
• Jessica Chance (Actor)
• David Curtis (Actor/Musician & Filmmaker)
• Lydia Diamond (Playwright/Professor, Boston University)
• Kirsten Greenidge (Playwright)
• Maria Hendricks (Actor/Activist)
• Obehi Janice (Actor/Producer/Playwright & Solo Performer, Fufu + Oreos)
• Sonya Smith Joyner (Actor)
• Allyssa Jones (Acting Senior Program Director for the Arts, Boston Public Schools)
• Terrence Kidd (Playwright/Co-Founder, Proscenium Playwrights, Lesley University)
• Barbara Lewis (Director, Trotter Institute at UMass Boston & Co-Founder, Boston Black Theater Collective)
• Monica White Ndounou (Scholar/Director, Tufts University)
• Mwalim Peters (Playwright/Director/Storyteller/Professor, UMass Dartmouth)
• Lisa Simmons (Founder, Roxbury Film Festival and Co-Founder Boston Black Theater Collective)
• Phyllis Smith (AEA Stage Manager/Associate Production Manager, Boston Center for the Arts)
• Beverly Morgan Welsh (Executive Director, Museum of African American History)
• Summer Williams (Director/Co-founder, Company One)

Anyone who knows the history of diversity in Boston knows that a bottleneck effect exists that causes change to take place at a very slow pace. For black artists in the theater community this effect is asphyxiating. The diversity of the meeting attendees signified a profound need for theater makers in Boston’s black community to come together across discipline, aesthetics, and organizational affiliations. Moreover, it reminded us that though sometimes dormant, Boston has a very vibrant community of black theater artists—some at the national forefront of our field.

The truth is that we have tried to come together many times over the years. Like a good old faithful automobile the engine would start and stop, start and stop, but perhaps the catalyst for this motor starting up again was the 2012 TCG Conference which was held here in Boston.

The theme of the conference was Model the Movement, yet as I looked around, I realized that the people who are synonymous with one of the most significant movements in United States history, the Civil Rights Movement, were without a model or a movement in Boston. It made me nervous to acknowledge this thought, then anxious, then nervous again. What does it mean? We, the children of the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Arts Movement, the sons and daughters of the Harlem Renaissance, were without a unified voice in a city with a rich history tied to the American Revolution. It made me wonder, where are we? I purposely avoided all the open conversations about race and diversity at the conference because I was ashamed that my city, the host city, didn’t have a model to share.

Enter the Latinos, our cousins. They too had the same questions, needs, and desires for unity—for a network, and they did something about it. They organized. In New York City, Los Angeles, and Miami. I was thinking it’s a shame that so many of my colleagues in the black community were not able to attend the conference. So I approached Dr. Barbara Lewis, Executive Director of the William Monroe Trotter Institute for the study of black culture at the University of Massachusetts Boston about organizing a meeting where those of us black theater artists who attended the conference could share and discuss what we learned and experienced. The meeting would also serve as a focus group for theater makers in the black community to devise a way of developing a similar network as our Latino cousins.

So, here I will try and recap what we experienced in our meeting. Truthfully, I don’t know what “we” experienced. The meeting was rather short—only one hour and forty-five minutes—to pick the brains of eighteen individuals who represented 222 plus years of experience gathered together in a room of only 750 square feet. But if hope is conciliation for dreaming, then we experienced hope. The gathering reflected the commitment of everyone in the room who gave up attending a meeting, a rehearsal, writing a grant proposal, a move, a child, a husband, a wife to be there. Everyone chose to break away from the life that keeps us all overly engaged and disconnected—to connect and acknowledge that we need to revisit the tribe. The call was wide and loud. Everyone was invited, which we felt was important—to model a movement that is inclusive of all.

So what did we accomplish in that small space, small time, under the weight of our collectively huge accumulated experience? We found we need to come back. We understood that we composed an immensely powerful syndicate that could start a movement not just for blacks, but for all people of color historically marginalized, misrepresented and underrepresented in the theater. Was it a planetary alignment that got us all in the room together?

Perhaps this remarkable gathering was a result of the recent reading of James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner staged by Barbara Lewis at the African Meeting House, the oldest black church in the country and part of the Museum of African American History. A part of PROJECT 1 VOICE, a national initiative to preserve black theater and culture, the reading featured prominent players from Boston’s public and private sectors. In participating in the PROJECT 1 VOICE reading, Lewis had done something quite unusual and revolutionary in Boston’s black arts scene—she had invited the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker to come out and play. A special quality of this evening was that all the theater makers were sitting in the audience—Lydia Diamond, Benny Ambush, among others—and they all came out changed. So changed in fact, that at this meeting Diamond remarked that the reading had instilled sense of community she had never before seen in Boston.

So where do we go from here? How do we come back together? There was a call at the meeting to come back not just for another meeting but instead to take action now—and to do it well and do it often. We could start with a monthly staged reading series, taking turns to present a play, a film, or a project being developed at our institutions or individually, and work as one producing team to educate and build the audience. The key to achieving success would be consistency—something that Boston has notoriously lacked in its feast or famine landscape of black theater.

So check in on us—“hold us to it” as Harmond Wilks of August Wilson’s Radio Golf would say. Coming to Boston? Send an email to bostonblacktheatercollective@gmail.com to find out when the next reading will be. I am optimistic, that this time is the right time. The best is yet to come!

The Ground on Which I Stand by August Wilson

This speech, given by August Wilson at the Theater Communications Group meeting in 1996, is one of many articles, organizations and people who have inspired the vision for Project1VOICE. I came across this and a copy of Alice Childress' TROUBLE IN MIND and my life was changed for good and for the better.   This speech is a call to action that puts the onus of preserving our history on us!  I hope it inspires you as much as it has all of us at Project1VOICE.

We encourage your comments and thoughts.

All the best my friends!

Preserving the legacy and tradition of Black theater is in all our hands!

Erich McMillan-McCall
Founder/Executive Director of Project1VOICE, INC

http://www.nathanielturner.com/groundonwhichistand.htm

We Did It Again With Your Help!

Dear P1V Family, Let me begin by saying "thank you"  for your loving kindness and support of Project1VOICE and our efforts over the last 24 months.  You already know we had a spectacular event on June 18th across the country at all 28 theaters.  With your help, we brought the national community together to celebrate and honor African-American theater and the seminal work of James Baldwin. Together we raised much needed funds and awareness as well as helped to develop audiences all on behalf of African-American theater. In addition, this year we added 10 new theaters and added 5 new cities. We were featured in several national publications-The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Black America Web and BET.com. All 28 theaters saw an increase in attendance at their events on June 18th, doubling and some even tripling their attendance and fundraising efforts. But without a question the piece de resistance was the masterful cadence of James Baldwin's THE AMEN CORNER which paved the way for an evening of incomparable theater excellence across America. We want to continue the trend of growth of P1V ensuring that we attract more people, like yourself, people who care about the arts, in particular the plight of African-American theater and its playwrights---preserving their legacy and tradition across America. This is where you come in. Help us find men and women like yourself, who share our mutual love and appreciation of the arts, people with passionate interests, people who want to make a difference and create change.  You know the people who will be the best fit for our organization. You’ve told them about us, now tell us about them! Take just a minute to share your P1V experience with a friend, on our facebook page and/or our website www.project1voice.org.  You can blog about us, share the PIV website with a friend and/or contact me directly Erich@project1voice.org, leave their information and yours. We want to hear from you. This is your chance to give people you know the opportunity to experience and support the transformative theatrical experience that only African-American theaters can provide. Adding more great people like yourself to our roster of supporters will not only increase our national awareness but it also brings in additional funds and partnerships we can use to build upon P1V's commitment to next step strategies to maintain and foster theater excellence. We’re already shaping our new series of events for 2013. You'll hear more from us in the coming weeks about being part of the P1V team. I thank you again for caring so deeply about P1V's future. Tax deductible and in-kind contributions can still be made to P1V, simply click the donate link on our website or contact me, erich@project1voice.org.   Let's keep African-American theater strong, vital and ALIVE! Forward, ever in 1VOICE! Sincerely, Erich McMillan-McCall   Founder/Executive Director of Project1VOICE, INC           Erich@project1voice.org                  Preserving the legacy and tradition of Black theater is in all our hands!