The Theatre Desk has been quiet for a while, in part because of the transitory and ephemeral nature of live theater itself. You catch if for the moment, then it is gone. We had tickets to Between Two Knees at the REP, but has seen it at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival years before and were not impressed, and could not give the tickets away. Then, Arts West Theatre was staging a play called On the Spectrum, but canceled it for reasons unrevealed, other saying that it was not up to their quality standards. They stated this in an email that we did not notice, and so arrived at a dark theatre on a Friday night.
And even this particular performance is a stand-in. The play scheduled for this slot vanished (reasons unknown to me - scheduling conflict is the official word), and this is the fill in. A one-person play, originally performed by Wilson at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Wilson passed on in 2005. Steven Anthony Jones picks up the torch and does a great job as Wilson, channeling the playwright through his memories of growing up in Pittsburgh's Hill District.
My own geographical journey oddly parallels Wilsons. I grew up in Pittsburgh, in one of the upper middle class suburbs south of the city. Wilson moved to the Midwest (Minnesota) and produced some of his best-known work. I moved to the Midwest (Wisconsin) and built a lot of worlds for TSR. I first encountered Wilson's plays at the Milwaukee Public Theatre. He moved out to Seattle, and years later, I did the same. As a result, the Lovely Bride and I have seen nine of the ten plays in his Century Cycle, also called the Pittsburgh Cycle, since nine of them are based out of the Hill District.
And Jones/Wilson comes out like a firehose here, bouncing from subject to subject, memory, old friend to old friend. He is continually in motion as he talks about aggressions against him (micro- and macro-) for the color of his skin as well as the community (musical as well a suddenly violent) that he was a part of. He shift through his early life and settles mostly in the mid-sixties, where he has a girl (well, several), a job (well, also several) and an apartment (sometimes). We don't get the process by how he became the playwright that he is best known for (his goal at the time to was be a poet), but we do see the fertile ground from which his stories came from.
This is a monologue, and it holds the standard monologue tropes - There's a table with a glass of water on it in front of a brick wall. But Jones is never seated at that table - instead he stalks through the rest of the set, interacting with the debris piled up along the sides of the stage - dancing, swinging, and swaggering as well. And that brick wall is Pittsburgh yellow brick, a pale golden made dingy by the smoke from the steel works, and is flashed with subjects to talk about. Each one sets Jones off in a different direction, but he pulls them all together over the course of the performance.
Its a long monologue, but much to my surprise, it moved swiftly and effortlessly. Jones, code-switches and tone-switches through dialects and characters easily. You hear the eloquent phrases of the poet, the repetitive word-choice of the raconteur, and the heart of the street. Jones does a fantastic job keeping up with Wilson's words and bringing them to a large audience.
Well done. Recommended.
More later,
