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    At Two Summer Theater Festivals, Reassuring Signs of Life

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    The industry is facing challenges, but in western Massachusetts the quality of the works is as rich as ever, our critic writes.Suddenly, out of the darkness, came one of the most thrilling sounds an audience can make: a collective gasp. This is how you know that the crowd is rapt, that the storytelling has taken hold. And so it had the other night during a performance of “Blues for an Alabama Sky” at Barrington Stage Company, where a different plot twist elicited another welcome noise: a mid-scene eruption of delighted applause. Humans can be a lot of fun to see a show with.That’s something to keep in mind at this crisis moment in the theater, whose prepandemic audiences have yet to return in their former numbers, and whose programming has shrunk accordingly. But that doesn’t mean the work itself has withered. Over a couple of days in Western Massachusetts last week, I saw two plays, one play reading and one cabaret, and if you looked at the quality of what was there — rather than the quantity of what was not — you’d hardly know that anything was amiss. And Barrington Stage, anyway, has not scaled back this year.“Blues for an Alabama Sky,” directed by Candis C. Jones on the Boyd-Quinson Stage in Pittsfield, Mass., is a tone-perfect production of Pearl Cleage’s 1995 play, set in the summer of 1930, that has plenty of resonance in the summer of 2023. It also shimmers with the charisma of a terrific cast playing funny, likable, fully dimensional friends.Angel (Tsilala Brock), a role originated by Phylicia Rashad, is a Harlem nightclub singer with a voice to fit her name. Guy (Brandon Alvión) is a chicly fabulous costume designer with exquisite taste. In the middle of the Great Depression, they are both freshly out of work — since the night Angel told off her gangster ex from the stage, and Guy defended her. Now they’re roommates, sharing his apartment.Angel hopes that Leland (DeLeon Dallas), a conventionally religious Southern stranger, will swoop in and save her, even though they are a catastrophic mismatch. Guy plans to be rescued by Josephine Baker, whose portrait hangs from his wall like a deity. He sends his designs to her in Paris, fantasizing that she will whisk him there.Across the hall, Angel and Guy’s earnest, impassioned social worker friend, Delia (Jasminn Johnson), is helping to open a family planning clinic — and maybe falling for their nightlife-loving doctor friend, Sam (Ryan George), who delivers babies all over the neighborhood.“I’m not trying to make a revolution,” Delia says, and if her drably sensible suits are any indication, she means it. “I’m just trying to give women in Harlem the chance to plan their families.”But self-determination — control over one’s own body in particular — has always been revolutionary, and freedom from straitjacketing social mores is what Angel and Guy have been chasing ever since they left Savannah for Harlem. As a Black woman and a gay Black man, they’ve each encountered violence aimed at them for that.“Blues for an Alabama Sky” is about the tenacity of hope, the limits of forgiveness and the romance of defiance. It’s a glittering spoken blues, layered with yearning.Bill Irwin in master-clown mode at the Williamstown Theater Festival, which is hosting a series of cabaret performances this summer.Emilio MadridAbout 20 miles north of Pittsfield, Williamstown Theater Festival is producing a drastically cropped season, none of whose offerings are open to review — because, a publicist said, they “are all in active development.” Fair enough. But the festival — which landed in trouble in 2021 when workers accused it of exploiting them, and in response produced a streamlined 2022 season — hasn’t lost its stardust, even without its customary fully staged productions.In the ’62 Center for Theater and Dance at Williams College, the festival’s longtime home, the WTF Cabaret set (by Se Hyun Oh) is stark, the lighting (by Emily Schmit) glamorous. Both audience and performers are onstage, with the auditorium’s rows of empty seats forming the backdrop for the show. A sculptural array of illuminated bulbs hangs in the air, like a constellation of ghost lights. Simplicity, this summer, is the festival’s friend.So, last weekend, was the actor Jeff Hiller. Lately risen on the cultural radar thanks to HBO’s heart-stirring friendship dramedy “Somebody Somewhere,” he hosted the cabaret, trying out comic material for an August show at Joe’s Pub. Bill Irwin performed in master-clown mode, and Jacob Ming-Trent knocked his songs so far out of the park that he could not have been a better advertisement for seeing him down the road in Lenox, Mass., playing Bottom in Shakespeare & Company’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Aug. 1-Sept. 10).The cabaret hosts and guests change each weekend, but the band and the core performers (Eden Espinosa, Asmeret Ghebremichael and Jon-Michael Reese) are constants. Reese’s fresh, textured interpretation of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” given a soulful flourish by the music director, Joel Waggoner, ought to be a constant, too.Nearby at the Clark, I saw a Williamstown Theater Festival reading of Cindy Lou Johnson’s “Plunder and Lightning,” directed by Portia Krieger. It would be unfair to evaluate the play, about a family of schemers teetering on the edge of ruin, but it was a genuine joy to watch Annie Golden rip into a substantial comic part, with the brilliant Johanna Day alongside her. Not a bad lineup for a Friday afternoon, or for a $15 ticket. And the legroom? Miles of it.Barrington Stage Company presented the world premiere of Mike Lew’s “tiny father,” a comedy set in a neonatal intensive care unit, featuring Andy Lucien as the father of a premature baby.Daniel RaderBack in Pittsfield, Barrington Stage Company was also engaged in new work: the world premiere of Mike Lew’s “tiny father” — a comedy set in a neonatal intensive care unit, where Daniel (Andy Lucien) has become the father of a daughter born 14 weeks premature, and is soon a solo parent. Caroline (Jennifer Ikeda), a nurse on the unit, is his guide through this alien landscape — and sometimes, Daniel thinks, his opponent there.Directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, it’s a smart play about parenthood, and the ways race and gender play into expectations and outcomes in health care and elsewhere. (Daniel is Black, his baby’s mother is Asian, and Caroline is written to be played by an Asian or Latina actress.) But the script demands an exceptionally tricky balance of comedy and emotional complexity in the portrayal of Daniel, which this production has yet to find. Talking to the baby, Sophia, though, Lucien is lovely always.Good news, then, from a theatrical landscape lately festooned with co-productions. Though this “tiny father” has ended its Barrington Stage run, it will get a chance to go deeper when it moves to Chautauqua Theater Company in Chautauqua, N.Y., next week. Butts in seats, please.Blues for an Alabama SkyThrough Aug. 5 at the Boyd-Quinson Stage, Pittsfield, Mass.; barringtonstageco.org.tiny fatherAug. 4-17 in the Bratton Theater at the Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, N.Y.; chq.org. More

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      Exploring Race and Resistance for Young Audiences

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeMake: BirriaExplore: ‘Bridgerton’ StyleParent: With ImprovRead: Joyce Carol OatesAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookExploring Race and Resistance for Young AudiencesA Harriet Tubman monologue, an animated “Sit-In” and a toy theater short about medical inequity deliver useful messages through varied mediums.Janet (center) intends to stage a protest over climate change in the animated “Sit-In.”Credit…via Alliance TheaterFeb. 9, 2021How can you build a hopeful future without first learning from the painful past?This question, which has arisen repeatedly over the last year, resonates in three new streaming theater productions for young people. Directed toward audiences 9 and older, each uses African-American history to reflect on current issues, including the Black Lives Matter movement, climate change and the coronavirus pandemic. Frequently unsparing in detail — and even in language — these works should inspire discussions well beyond Black History Month.“A Tribe Called Tubman,” from TheaterWorksUSA, is the most fully realized, incisive and moving of the shows, both because of its length — 42 minutes — and its reliance on an actor’s presence. (The other productions feature animation or puppetry.) Available indefinitely on TWUSA.TV, a platform that the company developed for its own work and that of other family-theater producers, the play stars Jada Suzanne Dixon as a serene and commanding Harriet Tubman, the escaped slave who became a leader of the Underground Railroad. (You must wait until the end to discover the identity of the tribe in the title.)Jada Suzanne Dixon as the title character in Idris Goodwin’s “A Tribe Called Tubman.”Credit…via TheaterWorksUSACasually dressed in contemporary clothes, Dixon spends much of her time in a simple black chair. But she doesn’t need to stride the stage. Written and directed by Idris Goodwin, the play refuses to enshrine Tubman as a towering heroine of near-mythical powers. “What if I was just as ordinary as anyone else?” she asks.Speaking conversationally and occasionally singing, she relates her experiences, which were far from ordinary. But they were human, and in portraying her as a flesh-and-blood woman, the script demonstrates that it is courageous people, not gods, who bring about social change.The show does, however, have a mystical side. Tubman says she has died twice and will die again. The first time was when her skull was struck by a metal bar thrown by an overseer trying to stop a fleeing slave. (Imitating that white man’s rage, she shouts the ugliest of racial slurs.) The second occasion was when she succumbed to pneumonia in 1913. And why is she here again?“The knee is still on our necks,” says Tubman, who was often called Moses. Having advised young audiences on how to pursue justice, she adds, “Maybe what I am now is that burning bush.”The Alliance Theater decided to animate Pearl Cleage’s “Sit-In” script when live performance became impossible.Credit…via Alliance TheaterAnother incendiary phrase — “Our house is on fire” — propels “Sit-In,” produced by Alliance Theater in Atlanta. This statement refers to global warming rather than civil rights, although Janet (Eden Luse), an 11-year-old African-American girl, soon learns how the struggles surrounding these issues are related.Janet finds herself in conflict with her best friends, Mary Beth (Bella Fraker) and Consuelo (Lena Castro), after she tells them she can’t be part of their singing trio at the talent show because she intends to stage a school sit-in about climate change. Consuelo retaliates by saying she won’t sing with Janet at an upcoming rally.Torn, and facing opposition at home and at school — she’s threatened with expulsion — Janet resolves her dilemma only after talking to her grandfather (L Warren Young), who tells her of his own participation in the Atlanta Student Movement in 1960.Inspired by “Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood Up by Sitting Down,” a picture book created by the married couple Andrea Davis Pinkney and Brian Pinkney, the play artfully transforms a true story of young Black men 60 years ago into a dramatic narrative about three contemporary girls of varying ethnicities.Faced with the Covid lockdown, the playwright Pearl Cleage and the director Mark Valdez worked with Alliance and the Palette Group to turn the production into a 33-minute animated film. The result incorporates a rich soundtrack (by Eugene H. Russell IV) and a vivid interplay of images, including gritty footage of the real 1960s lunch counter sit-ins.Streaming on Alliance’s website and on TWUSA.TV through June 30, “Sit-In” educates and entertains, though I wish it had been longer. The play illustrates that protest carries risks, but ends before you learn the consequences of the 21st-century student activism it depicts.The set and characters in “Diamond’s Dream,” like this image inside a train car, are constructed from detailed cutouts.Credit…via Chicago Children’s TheaterThe visually mesmerizing “Diamond’s Dream,” presented by Chicago Children’s Theater, is even shorter — just under 18 minutes. Created by Jerrell L. Henderson (who also directed) and Caitlin McLeod (who designed it), this toy theater production features a set and characters constructed from meticulously detailed cutouts. The scrolling painterly backdrops and Daniel Ison’s soundtrack enhance the feeling that you’re inside an L train in Chicago.The play, which streams free on the company’s YouTube channel, CCTv, through June 22, unfolds in the present day, when Diamond (Davu Smith), an African-American youth wearing a surgical mask, is on his way to visit his dying grandmother. (Whether she has Covid-19 is unclear.) After dozing in his empty train car, he suddenly encounters a Black girl (Amira Danan), who tells him she’s a lost spirit who can’t recall her identity. She remembers only how “the colored people got hit by the flu, the big flu” and how “an angry mob” arrived as she was dying.The “big flu” is the 1918 pandemic, and the “angry mob” refers to attacks by white rioters during what is now known as the Red Summer of 1919, but children are unlikely to grasp this unless they consult an accompanying online study guide. And although the production offers an emotional resolution, it still feels like only a tantalizing taste of what deserved to be a bigger project. Parents and teachers will have to help young viewers investigate the subjects — racial inequities in housing and health care, the disproportionate effects of disease on minorities — that “Diamond’s Dream” raises yet doesn’t fully explore.What can’t be ignored is that these historical struggles continue. Or, as Harriet Tubman puts it in Goodwin’s play, “The scars are still fresh.”A Tribe Called TubmanOn TWUSA.TVSit-InThrough June 30; alliancetheatre.orgDiamond’s DreamOn YouTube through June 22; chicagochildrenstheatre.orgAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More