Berlin Memoir, Part 1

[Back in 2005, after watching a TV broadcast of The Big Lift (Twentieth Century Fox, 1950), a movie about the Berlin Airlift (July 1948-September 1949), I started a long e-mail narrative for my friend Kirk about my time as a Military Intelligence officer in West Berlin.  It began when I described some moments in the movie, shot on location in Berlin, that were very evocative of my life in Germany either in the early 1960s when I was a teenager (see my earlier memoir “An American Teen In Germany,” 9 and 12 March 2013) or my army years in Berlin in the early ’70s.  For some reason, Kirk shared my comments with his mother and she came back with some questions.  Answering them set me off between 13 and 17 December 2005 on a five-e-mail tear of reminiscences and anecdotes about my 2½ years at the forward outpost of the Cold War.  A little editing and reorganizing, and those messages turned into the stream-of-consciousness memoir that starts below.

[I’ve published sections of this narrative before on ROT, but I’ve found that excising those sections, which weren’t all contiguous in this text (I cherry-picked to create those other posts), is too difficult, so I’m going to allow myself to repeat some of what I’ve already posted on the blog.  I hope you’ll forgive me for my indulgence.  (For those ROTters who haven’t read the older Berlin stories, this complete telling will seem entirely new.  Aren’t you fortunate!)  Because of the length of this memoir, I’ll be publishing it in sections over some time.  I haven’t worked out a schedule for the eight sections, but I’ll be posting them about two or three weeks apart, possibly longer.]

I lived in Germany twice.  First, from 1962 to ’67, while my father was with the U.S. Information Agency there.  (Known abroad as the U.S. Information Service, USIA was the cultural propaganda agency of the foreign service.  There’s a brief history of USIA/USIS in part one of “An American Teen in Germany.”)  Then I was stationed in West Berlin from 1971 to ’74 while I was in the army.

After I graduated from high school in Switzerland, I returned to the States for college.  I took ROTC in college so I was commissioned a second lieutenant when I graduated, and I started active duty at Ft. Knox, Kentucky, on 5 December 1969.  I spent the next 18 months in one Army school or another.  My one and only duty station was West Berlin where I was a Military Intelligence officer from 29 July 1971 to 15 February 1974, when I left to get out of the service.  I was a counterintel agent at Berlin Station, the MI unit attached to Berlin Brigade; we were a unit of the 66th MI Group of the U.S. Army, Europe, whose HQ was in Munich. 

I firmly believe that my particular language studies and skills helped land me in Berlin instead of somewhere else, such as Vietnam.  First, language skills is one of the assets MI looked for, so it helped qualify me for my choice of branch assignment when I was commissioned.  Second, one of the courses I took in college was linguistics, the analytic study of language.  One of the things I learned in linguistics is how to piece together a grammar from fragments of the spoken language.  We did this as exercises several times in class, and it was part of the mid-term and final exams.  When I got to Ft. Knox, one of the battery of tests we all had to take was the ALAT, the Army Language Aptitude Test.  Lo and behold, the test was exactly that—a language whose grammar we had to glean from sentences, phrases, and words provided.  I maxed the test which meant I could choose any language training I wanted (except French and German, since I already offered the Army those) and I was assured of getting it. 

There was one slot available in a Russian course, and I grabbed it.  (If I hadn’t chosen a language, the Army, in its wisdom, was going to choose one for me.  They weren’t going to ignore my test score.  They would have sent me to Vietnamese classes, and that led to only one assignment.)  I spent almost a year at the Defense Language Institute, West Coast (DLIWC), at the Presidio of Monterey, California, studying Russian six hours a day from March 1970 to February ’71.  (Now that’s a cushy assignment!  A year in one of the most beautiful spots in the country with six hours’ of duty a day doing something that for me was not only easy, but fun!  Oh, please, don’t throw me into that briar patch!) 

Near the end of the Russian course, I took the language proficiency tests for German and French as well as Russian so they were all on my record.  (I had even gotten released from afternoon classes in my Russian course for the last few weeks so I could join a German class to brush up.)  Now, the fact is that Russian language was an asset in Vietnam—particularly for an MI officer—because of the Soviet presence there.  And French was an asset because many older Vietnamese still spoke French as a second language rather than English because Indo-China had been French colonies.  But German was the key—there’s only one obvious place in the whole world where we had troops where French, German, and Russian were all important skills: not just Germany, but specifically Berlin—a German city occupied by the four World War II allies: the American and the Brits (who speak English), the French, and the Soviets (who speak Russian).  Eh, voilà!

My fluency in German was the third reason my language studies helped me.  Since I had also lived in Germany for several years and knew the culture as well as the language, the Army wisely sent me to Berlin instead of Saigon.  (The common wisdom among GI’s was that 90% of all soldiers were malassigned.  Not me—I was just where I should have been!)  The one unpredictable element left was what would happen after 18 months, which was the standard tour for an officer in Berlin when I arrived.  (Ordinarily, if it hadn’t been for the war in Southeast Asia, Berlin was a three-year tour.)  After that, it was home leave and shipment to Vietnam.  I was counting on making myself so indispensable in Berlin that they’d keep me there rather than waste me in Southeast Asia.  I never had to test that plan, though: the Paris cease-fire was signed in January 1973.  But if I hadn’t been in Berlin to begin with, I can bet on where I’d have ended up.  I have no doubt that my acuity in French and German plus my study of Russian were the principal reasons I was in Berlin.

I watched an old flick I taped off TV one night in 2005.  It wasn’t a terribly remarkable movie as far as cinema goes, but it had some startling, small moments of reflected reality.  Not Realism—reality.  The movie was The Big Lift with Montgomery Clift, released in 1950 about the 1948-49 Berlin Airlift.  It was shot in 1949 on location in Berlin (using both local German actors for the German roles and actual military personnel for all the Army and Air Force characters except Clift and Paul Douglas).  Most of the little things that hit me were about life in post-war Germany and occupied Berlin.  As odd as it may seem from a chronological perspective, life in Germany was not very different in the early ’60s when I was there as a kid than it was right after the war.  Less rubble, more prosperity (the Wirtschaftswunder, or Economic Miracle, was just beginning), but otherwise, it was still “post-war.”  (Of course, it was also the Federal Republic by then—no longer Allied occupied territory.)  Berlin, even in the ’70s, when I was there ten years further on, was still occupied and, except for new uniforms (and still less rubble), plus the addition of the Wall, things were much the same in many ways as they were right after the war ended.  It was a time warp, in both instances. 

For instance, one character in the film says he checked someone, a German citizen, out in “the Document Center” and found a record of her from the war years.  The Berlin Document Center was, in fact, the records repository of the Third Reich’s official files, and it was in the American Sector of Berlin so we ran it as a resource.  It was one of the agencies my MI unit always checked when we did background investigations of a German native who was old enough to have lived in the Third Reich.  (Mind you, this was all the official records, so a file might reveal only that someone was an old-age pensioner, had been a dues-paying member of the musicians guild, or had held a job as a schoolteacher in Frankfurt.  Only occasionally did a file check of the BDC reveal a criminal record or service in the SS or something nefarious.) 

Anyway, it’s just a passing mention of something actual, like the brief description the pilot of Clift’s plane gives of flying into Tempelhof AFB on their first flight in from Frankfurt.  The Soviets controlled the airspace over what was then their occupation zone of Germany (later the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany) and restricted Allied flights to a very narrow corridor.  Plus, Tempelhof was actually in downtown Berlin—you landed over city buildings, and the movie shows this, both from the air as the pilots approach, and from the city as planes land or take off practically outside apartment windows. 

(Tempelhof Airport, part of which was civilian and part a U.S. Air Force Base, was closed in 2008.  In my day, however, only specially certified pilots were allowed to fly in and out of Berlin.  One of these was the newly-appointed CO of Tempelhof, Col. Gail Halvorsen.  In 1948-49, Halvorsen had become a hero to the children of Berlin—by the ’70s, the adults running the city.  He became known as the Candy Bomber because he dropped Hershey bars from his plane whenever he flew over the city on his landing approach.  I knew Colonel Halvorsen—his daughter was a member of our theater group, which met at Tempelhof—and once when I took an Air Force hop into Berlin from Ramstein AFB, he piloted the plane.  My little brush with actual history.) 

What most often caught me in The Big Lift were the little bits of German culture and custom that are incorporated in the movie.  In one scene, set in the apartment of one of the German characters, a group of people are sitting and standing around late in the evening, drinking and noshing—a kind of impromptu celebration.  A neighbor comes in, a woman who lives in another apartment in the building.  She’s just arriving from work, and stops in to say hello.  When she arrives, she makes the rounds of all the guests, stopping at each person and shaking his or her hand and saying “Guten Abend.”  When she reaches the last person, she says she’s tired and off home to bed and immediately reverses her route, shaking all the same hands in reverse order, saying “Gute Nacht” as she works her way back out the door.  That’s so German—the formal, hand-shaking greeting of each and every person present, even though you don’t plan to stay, and then doing the exact same thing to say good night.  In Germany, at least back when I was living there—they may have caught the American casualness disease since my day—you couldn’t just stick your head in the door, wave, and say to everyone at once, “Hi.  And good night,” and then leave.  It couldn’t have been realer if it had been a documentary!  And there were other, briefer bits, too—like the vendor in the U-Bahn (subway) who sells loose cigarettes.  You could still buy individual cigarettes in much of Europe when I was in school there—a pack was relatively pricey even in the ’60s.

There was one other real note the movie struck—more in line with my old job in Berlin, like the reference to the BDC.  While he’s visiting a woman he had met, Clift meets a neighbor who stops in at the woman’s apartment.  They introduce themselves to one another and chit-chat briefly, then the man takes a seat by the window and takes out a pad and makes notes as planes land at the airport.  (I told you, the planes flew right by the windows!)  Clift asks the man what he’s doing.  “I’m a Russian spy,” he answers matter-of-factly.  Clift is taken aback slightly, as you might expect.  He asks if the man’s not afraid that Clift might report him.  “The Americans know I do this,” he states.  “And the Russians know that the Americans know.” 

He also explains that because the Russians don’t believe the newspaper announcements of the airlift’s progress—since the Soviets lie, they assume everyone else does, too—they insist on getting their own statistics.  Since the official reports are accurate—the U.S. wants everyone to know what they’re doing; it’s good propaganda—he tells Clift that he leaves out one or two flights, just so the Russians feel they’re getting “real” figures.  Later in the movie, he has stepped out of the living room briefly just as a plane comes in to land.  He sticks his head around the corner, then smiles at Clift and says, “That one was just American propaganda!”

Anyway, the man tells Clift that the Russians are spying on the Americans with 20,000 agents in Berlin, and the Americans are spying on the Russians, only with just 10,000 agents.  Both sides know that the other side is spying, and that each side also knows that the other side knows.  It’s all very absurd—but not inaccurate.  When I was in Berlin in the ’70s, not only were the Soviets (and the East Germans, of course) spying on us and we on them, but, of course, the French and British were also spying on the Soviets and vice versa.  But the Allies were spying on each other as well.  And there were spies in Berlin from Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and other Soviet Bloc countries (often as surrogates for the KGB or the GRU, the military intelligence organization), all spying on everyone else—including each other.  There were even Chinese spies operating in Berlin—a country with no obvious need to be in Berlin—as well as Israelis and others.   The Cold War was mighty crowded in Berlin!  The divided city was espionage-central in that era—the counterpart of, say, Lisbon in WWII.  It was like living in Casablanca. 

With the possible exception of Saigon, Cold War Berlin may have had more spies per capita than any other place on Earth (though the movie’s figures were greatly inflated, of course).  It certainly had spies from more countries and agencies than anywhere else.  (I’m sure there’s a comedy of errors in this somewhere!)  The first day I reported to our offices, which were in the HQ compound on Clayallee in the Dahlem section of the borough of Zehlendorf, which also housed both the Berlin Brigade command (one-star general), the military governor’s office (two-star general), and the Minister’s office—the highest-ranking diplomatic officer in Berlin, just below an ambassador—I noticed two black Russian sedans, Volgas or Moskviches, parked, one by each exit from the compound.  Aside from being black, the Soviet vehicles were very recognizable, looking as they did like something left over from the early ’50s.  I asked about them, and Lt. Chuck Lurey, my sponsor, the officer who was assigned to help me get acclimated, told me that they were almost always there, just watching, taking notes and probably photos—and that within an hour of my arrival, they knew my name, rank, and assignment.   By the same token, I later got info copies of the transcripts of the wiretaps from Potsdam, the Soviet military HQ in East Germany. 

MI personnel wore civilian clothes on duty and were all addressed as “Mr.” or “Miss” outside the office.  When we had to wear fatigues—for the firing range, say, or during an alert—we wore no branch or rank insignia, only the U.S. device.  We weren’t clandestine, but low-profile.  Our home addresses and phone numbers were unlisted in both the Berlin city and the Berlin Brigade directories, and our cars were all registered in Munich, not Berlin.  (In accordance with the Occupation Agreement among the four wartime allies, each power had free access to all sectors of Berlin.  Both official and unofficial personnel were permitted to travel throughout the city; the Western allies even encouraged this—with certain exceptions, as you’ll hear.) 

My musings on The Big Lift set me off remembering.  As you might imagine, my quarter-decade (sounds more impressive than two-and-a-half years) in Berlin included several unique events.  Being in MI only exacerbated that fact.  (It didn’t escape our attention that MI could also stand for Mission: Impossible.  Our official title OTJ was Special Agent—so we used to hum Johnny Rivers’s 1965 hit “Secret Agent Man” at each other when we crossed paths out in the world.  I often felt like Agent 86—would you believe . . . ?)

Speaking of Get Smart: Would you believe we had a real-life Cone of Silence?  Of course, it wasn’t really a cone, and it didn’t descend from the ceiling over our Chief’s desk—but otherwise, it was the very same idea.  It was, to put it simply, a room suspended inside another room.  (I don’t know the technology—such as what did the suspending.  Probably classified.)  Over my years in Berlin, I had a couple of occasions when I had to brief the Berlin Brigade CO, the brigadier general who commanded the enhanced brigade stationed in the city.  (As I mentioned, there was also a major general who was the military governor, the U.S. Commander, Berlin, or USCOB.  I had to brief him, too, on occasion.) 

The Occupation Agreement limited the U.S. to one brigade of troops in Berlin, so we just created a brigade two or three times the size of an ordinary unit (1,500-3,200 soldiers)—a couple of extra infantry companies in each battalion and a couple of extra tank companies in the armor battalion (up to 6,000 troops)—which is why the CO was a brigadier general instead of just a colonel.  Aside from BB, there were other troops, like our unit, which were stationed in Berlin, plus the Air Force.  There may have been as many as 10,000 U.S. soldiers, airmen, and DAC’s (Department of the Army Civilians) in Berlin in my day, plus State Department personnel, agencies like the FBI and CIA, and employees of the EES (the European Exchange System, the operator of PX’s in USAREUR and BX’s in USAFE), and dependent schools, and so on.  Of those, maybe 2,000 were engaged in some kind of intelligence work.  

(I said earlier that there was a U.S. Mission in Berlin, our diplomatic office in the politically sensitive city.  I had little contact with the minister, but in early summer 1972, about a year after I arrived, President Nixon appointed a new ambassador to the Federal Republic.  He was Martin J. Hillenbrand who, from 1963 to ’67 had been Deputy Chief of Mission at the embassy in Bonn—my father’s boss.  The ambassador maintained an office at the Berlin mission and on the afternoon of 7 July, when he paid his first visit to the city, I called on Hillenbrand there to say hello and reintroduce myself to him after a decade.)

Anyway, the first time I had to go to a briefing for the BB commander—I don’t remember which incident this was, but I can guess—it was in the secure room.  (It had a name, of course, but I can’t remember it.)  Someone described the room to me beforehand, so I sort of knew what it was, but as soon as I got there—you actually go through two doors, one for each “room”—all I could think of was the Cone of Silence.  It was all I could do to keep from cracking up during the briefing while I was waiting my turn.  You must picture this: I was the only lieutenant in the room, and if not the only junior officer, one of just one or two at most.  The rest were majors and up, including at least one bird colonel (more of him later), and, of course, the general.  I was also the only one who saw any humor in this proceeding.  Making reference to the Cone of Silence would not have been appreciated. 

By the way, at the start of The Big Lift, there’s a voice-over that explains how the Soviets started the blockade.  The VO describes how the crossing points (the famous Checkpoint Charlie, for instance) were all closed, the trains halted at the border of the Soviet Zone, and the Autobahns connecting Berlin to the Allied zones were closed to Allied traffic.  The airlift defeated this action and the Soviets never tried it again—but they did keep up the same tactics on a sporadic and short-term basis.  Every few months, they’d stop the supply trains from West Germany (formally, the Federal Republic of Germany, or FROG to the military; GI’s in Berlin called it The Zone, left over from the days of the Occupation) and keep them on a siding for hours, maybe a day.  On another occasion, they’d stop all the traffic on the Autobahn—official Allied traffic was restricted to one designated route through East Germany between Berlin and Helmstedt on the border—and back cars and trucks up at one or another of the checkpoints. 

Another thing the Soviets loved to do on the Autobahn was to make us deal with the East German guards instead of the Soviet ones.  They knew we weren’t supposed to do that before the U.S. recognized the German Democratic Republic (GDR or DDR) in September 1974—we were supposed to demand to see a Soviet official.  They knew there wasn’t anything we could really do out on the highway, though.  When they did that, we’d have to report the incident when we got to our destination, either in Berlin or Helmstedt.  (In the military, the GDR was officially called the Soviet Zone of Occupied Germany, or SZOG, before recognition.)  There were also occasional “incidents” at Checkpoints Alpha, Bravo, or Charlie, engineered as an excuse to close them for several hours.  (These were not the same as real incidents that also occurred at the checkpoints or elsewhere along the Wall every few weeks.  People were still trying to escape from the East even as late as the ’70s.  Every month or so, there were shots fired at one of the checkpoints; then everyone would scramble.)

Helmstedt, by the way, was a peculiar place in those days.  It was just a small university town—a large village, really, of about 28,000 inhabitants in the ’70s (fewer now)—but it happened to be situated right at the spot on the Autobahn designated as the official crossing point, Checkpoint Alpha, from West Germany into East Germany.  (Ordinary civilians could cross over at any number of border crossings, but official Allied personnel, both civilian and military, had to use this route.  Checkpoint Bravo was the other end of the highway where it crossed from East Germany into West Berlin, 110 miles from Helmstedt.  Charlie, of course, was the crossing point at Friedrichstrasse between the Berlins.)  As a result of its location, Helmstedt was the site not only of a large MP unit, a satellite of the Berlin Provost Marshall’s Office, but of a huge “listening post” run by the ASA—the Army Security Agency, the division of the army responsible for signals intelligence, or SIGINT, and electronic intelligence, or ELINT—otherwise known as electronic eavesdropping.  I was engaged in what was known as HUMINT, or human intelligence. 

Several of the enlisted GI’s from my Russian class in Monterey were stationed in Helmstedt.  They spent 24/7 eavesdropping in eight-hour shifts through immense antennas and other electronic listening gear on Russian and East German transmissions and telephone communications.  There were enough microwave transmitters and receivers on top of the compound to cook a large herd of cattle into roast beef!  But except for the ASA and the MP’s, the town was just this sleepy little village.  (I visited one of my former Russkie classmates, who had become a friend even though he was an EM.)  That’s probably all it is now.  It’s not even a border town anymore!

That route between the Zone and West Berlin was actually a series of three Autobahns, and it was very possible to go astray at the two interchanges and wander off into East Germany.  That, of course, was a major no-no.  Every week or so there’d be some problem with a GI getting lost on the road or having some other trouble with the East Germans or the Soviets on that highway and one of us would have to interview the guy, find out if there was any real security breach, and scare the hell out of him so he didn’t do it again.  The same was true for GI’s who went over to East Berlin and got into one kind of difficulty or another.  The Soviets loved to approach GI’s in the S-Bahn stations (the Berlin subway which was controlled by the East Germans; we had the U-Bahn system, and both traveled under the Wall) and try to get ID cards or some other low-level document.  (The S-Bahn, for Strassenbahn, was a sort of commuter rail system; the U-Bahn, for Untergrundbahn, was the ordinary subway system.  Both systems predated the war and, therefore, the Wall, and traversed the entire city.  The Occupation Agreement gave the Soviets control over the S-Bahn and the western allies control of the U-Bahn, hence the Cold War dichotomy.)

Since any contact by a GI with an East German or Soviet agent had to be reported, we were constantly interviewing soldiers who’d been approached.  Most soldiers stationed in Berlin knew better and walked away, then reported the incident when they got back to the West—but every now and then, when some unit in the Zone would send a busload of GI’s to Berlin for a “Berlin Orientation Tour,” there’d be some screw-up because they were never properly briefed before they were let loose in the city.  No one told them, for instance, that the S-Bahn was East German and that the big station, Friedrichstrasse, was under East Berlin and loaded with East German and Soviet agents just waiting to compromise them.  Their purpose wasn’t really to gain anything valuable—just to cause trouble.  The poor GI’s were usually scared shitless, often even before we talked to them.  (It was our job, aside from determining that there wasn’t any serious security problem, to scare them some more.  These talks were called SAEDA briefings—Subversion and Espionage Directed Against the Army; they were pretty much pro forma.)

I remember one interview very specifically because it involved a teenager, a high school boy whose dad was a GI in Berlin.  He’d driven into the Zone with a teacher—I forget why now, some perfectly innocent field trip—but on the way back into Berlin on the Autobahn, when they stopped at one of the checkpoints along the route, the kid decided to practice the Russian he’d been learning.  While the teacher was getting the papers attended to, the boy started a conversation with a Soviet guard and gave him a pack of American cigarettes.  (Russian cigarettes—papyrosi, to be precise—are disgusting things; American ones were a prized acquisition.)  Well, someone in another car at the checkpoint saw this exchange and reported it at the MP station at Checkpoint Bravo.  The MP’s immediately reported this to us, and we got the crossing lists—the document kept at each checkpoint on which the cars of all GI’s and civilian or military staff were registered as they passed through.  We ID’d the car in the report, found out who owned it, tracked down the teacher and ID’d the student, and called him in for a SAEDA talk.  I was the agent assigned to talk to the kid.  Man, he’d have liked to piss his pants, he was so scared.  No matter how much I assured him that nothing was going to happen, he was sure his father was going to get shipped home at the very least.  It was quickly obvious, of course, that nothing serious had happened—though contact with a Soviet guard was against regs for obvious reasons.  (It’s one of the excuses the Soviets would use to shut down the road and cause a diplomatic incident if they were in that mood at the time.  This isn’t paranoia—it’s realism.)  I did the Dutch Uncle routine—me being not much older than the kid was, you understand—and sent him home.  I sure wouldn’t have wanted that kid’s dreams that night!  (Me, I felt like a big shot!)

[This is the first installment of what will be a series of eight posts on my tour of duty as a Military Intelligence Special Agent in West Berlin.  The series will be posted irregularly every two or three weeks, so I can’t say now when Part 2 will appear, but I can tell you that it picks up with a little bit about what it was like to live in Cold War Berlin from the point of view of a GI.  I hope you’ll come back to ROT to read the rest of the series.] 

Visual & Spatial Structure In Theater And Dance

[About five years ago, I posted a two-part article called “Theatrical Structure” (15 and 18 February 2011) which was my attempt to introduce and explain the analytical system of Michael Kirby (1931-97), a professor of mine at NYU who was a Structuralist.  He published “Manifesto of Structuralism” in The Drama Review in 1975 and taught a course in the Department of Performance Studies called Theatrical Structure, which I took.  My 2011 post is a description of Michael's analytical method, using Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead as a model.  In “Theatrical Structure,” I posit that Kirby’s Structural Theory is useful, both in analysis and in creation, to playwrights—Michael wrote Structuralist plays; I even did a staged reading of one—directors, designers, and teachers of theater and drama, not to mention practitioners of other disciplines such as dance, opera, vaudeville, and, even, circus.  As an illustration of the system’s applicability, below are two articles I wrote for Michael 33 years ago, one examining structure of a dance performance and the other looking at the performance structure (as distinguished from literary structure) of a play.  (For detailed explanations of some structural terminology, it’s easiest to refer to the 2011 post which includes definitions of all the structural devices Michael identified.)]

STRUCTURE IN DANCE: SIN CHA HONG’S LAUGHING STONE

7 December 1983

In The Art of Making Dances, Doris Humphrey identifies the ingredients of dance as a design in space, dynamics or energy flow, a rhythm, and a motivation. To make a dance from these elements, she says, “the creator must then know how to put the parts together . . . .”  The “technique for sewing them together” is the structure of the dance, and it’s what we see as spectators that unifies the performance in our minds so that we recognize it as a whole dance, and not a series of “broken fragments.”

So much for theory.  On the stage at La MaMa E.T.C. in the East Village, the performance of Sin Cha Hong’s Laughing Stone troupe in Here/Now (viewed Friday night, 2 December 1983) frequently proved structurally ambiguous.  This was most true if one attempted, as I did, to identify structural connections among the three pieces—“Two-in-One,” “Tripterous,” and the title piece, “Here/Now”—all of which were choreographed by Miss Hong.  Whereas individual dances evidenced several strong structural elements, those common to all three dances were few in number and minimal in effect.

Formally, the three pieces all seemed to fall into what Miss Humphrey calls “the ‘broken’ form, deliberately illogical, in which lack of continuity in idea is the point.”  She further describes this dance form as one in which “all the movement is disconnected from its natural sources.  Small parts of the body, such as hands and feet, move independently of the trunk and of each other.”  The result of this is to make structural analysis very difficult because the movements, gestures, and designs incorporated in the dances are purposely disorienting—even anti-structural.  Structure, nonetheless, exists, though perhaps in a vaguer manifestation than in more regular or classical choreography.

The areas of design, rhythm, and dynamics formed the structural common ground in the program.  Those few elements which connected the three separate pieces into a somewhat unified whole—identifying them as part of one choreographer’s oeuvre—occurred in these fields.

Though there were incidents of Contrasting rhythms, the dominant tempo of all Miss Hong’s pieces was slow—almost excruciatingly so.  Occasionally this alternated with a rapid, jiggling rhythm and, more frequently, near or absolute stillness—but the dancers always returned to a slow-motion walking rhythm in which the dynamics were smooth, rounded, often circular.  In fact, Miss Hong’s uses of sharp angles in gesture or movement were rare and stood out in Contrast when they occurred.

Circularity in one form or another was by far the most common technique in the design of the program.  Though the La MaMa performing space is rectangular—almost square—Miss Hong’s pieces were frequently lit by round pools of light from overhead spots.  (Lighting was by Blu, the professional name of William Lambert.)  One such pool was a perfect light circle in the center of the stage within which, in one significant example, Miss Hong performed her entire solo piece, “Here/Now,” which itself was circular in movement design.  Even though the light circle spread out ambiguously during the dance, Miss Hong never strayed beyond that circle’s original boundaries.

This light circle also occurred, less markedly and more briefly, in “Tripterous” and “Two-in-One.”  Even David Simons, the composer-musician for “Tripterous,” seated on his square rug down right, was lit by a perfect circle of light.

But circularity was also apparent in movement design as well.  I have already mentioned that Miss Hong moved in a circle in her solo, rotating as if around a fulcrum in the center of the light spot.  In “Tripterous,” the four dancers (Monique Ernst, Nadine Helstroffer, Phyllis Jacobs, and Margueritte Johnson) frequently formed a large circle, and individual circles occurred as performers in the three pieces danced in small circles or curled their bodies, carrying the smooth, curved dynamics to the extreme.

Lighting also played another structural part in unifying the performance.  All three numbers began and ended with the same lighting sequence.  The dancers entered in darkness and took positions to be “discovered” as the lights faded up slowly.  Movement started long before the lights were fully up, and stopped before the final slow fade-out was complete.  At the end of the piece the performers exited in darkness as they had entered.  (The only exception to this routine was the entrance of the performers in “Tripterous,” which was dimly lit, presumably to allow Mr. Simons to enter down left and cross to his rug down right without stepping on his instruments in the dark.) 

Aside from the rhythmical Continuity (i.e., exaggerated slowness), the most noticeable stylistic repetition in the program was the total lack of expression on the dancers’ faces.  Except in one phrase of “Tripterous” in which the quartet sat in a circle and laughed, their faces were mask-like and immobile.  Even in “Two-in-One” where the two dancers (Jacobs and Karen Cahoon) faced one another and interacted physically, there was no “eye contact” as we know it in theater—the pair’s facial expressions did not change in reaction to this interaction.  There was, therefore, no suggestion of emotional or psychological interaction and, consequently, no discernible Action, Aristotelian or Stanislavskian, indicated in the pieces.  Structurally, however, this absence was itself a Thematic and unifying device.

A Pattern of pairing was another unifying element in Miss Hong’s work at La MaMa.  An alteration of an action and its opposite recurred a number of times in the performance.  This was least obvious in the solo piece, where it only showed up as stretching upwards and then contracting back down again and as regularly reversing the direction of rotation.  In the other two pieces, however, there were many variations of this action-reaction routine: separation-coming together, stretching-collapsing and, most basic perhaps, movement-stillness.  (This last occurred as a true regular Pattern in “Two-in-One,” where the periods of movement and stillness each measured approximately 12 to 15 seconds during one segment.)  In addition to these paired physical Actions, there was an auditory pairing that occurred in all three pieces when the voices in “Two-in-One,” the music in “Tripterous” and the sound effects in “Here/Now” alternated with silent passages.

The last element I found among all three pieces was less dynamic than the others, but no less common.  In many of Miss Hong’s motionless passages (and a few of her very slow ones), each performer balanced on some part of her body—a knee, one leg, her toes, her buttocks, her head (in a three-point head-stand).  In her final solo piece, since Miss Hong never rose higher than to her knees, there were only a few instances of balancing, but in the first two pieces, as with the action-reaction pairing, balancing occurred often and in a variety of forms.

Overall, then, what sewed Sin Cha Hong’s program together structurally was to be found for the most part in the areas of spatial design, rhythm, and dynamics.  The program Here/Now was primarily circular, slow-paced, curved and smooth.  In the individual pieces there were other structural devices, such as Contrasting rhythms, Parallelism, Echo, and Expectancy, but they did not recur in all three dances or work structurally to unite them across the entire performance into a whole. 

*  *  *  *

VISUAL AND SPATIAL STRUCTURE IN THE MAIDS

23 November 1983

  

“Structure” is defined as “the arrangement or interrelation of all the parts of a whole.”  Performance structure, by extension, is the arrangement or interrelation of the parts of a theatrical production as perceived by the spectator.  If we restrict our perception to the visual or spatial structure of the piece, then the parts in whose arrangement and interrelation we are interested become limited to the nonverbal elements of the performance, specifically the stage setting, the costume and props, and the gestures and movements of the actors.  The arrangements and interrelations that are visually structural are those that, in the spectator’s mind, create a connection across not only time, but space, uniting two distinct points on the stage as well as two isolated moments in time.

In the White Light Productions presentation of Jean Genet’s The Maids at the New Vic Theatre on Second Avenue in the East Village (viewed Friday night, 18 November 1983), a number of visual connections were obvious from the moment we entered the auditorium.  The set (by Mike Vesea) was stylistically unified by both its color Theme—entirely black with white trim—and construction medium—wire mesh throughout, including walls, furniture and two hanging “mirrors.”  The Thematic color combination was repeated again in the costume (uncredited) of the maids Claire (Mim Solberg) and Solange (Shelley Volk).

Within the dichromatic set, movement, gesture, and pose created several striking connections.  (The staging was by Peter Scangarello.)  A physical Parallelism connected two areas of the stage when Claire was seated at the secretary down right using Madame’s cosmetics to apply her toilette, while Solange knelt up center left, behind the mesh “wall” that divided the set into two rooms, ritually lighting a pair of candles on either side of a statue of the Virgin Mary.  The two women moved their heads in unison: as Claire examined her face both right and left in the mirror, behind her, Solange lit the candles first right then left, turning her head in each direction as she did so.  The two women put on half-masks simultaneously, and as Claire rose from her seat, Solange raised her head from its bowed position.  Both actresses froze at that moment and held their poses for several seconds.

In more isolated instances, three repeated Actions connected moments across time.  The least frequent of these was a repeated gesture, or posture—standing, usually center stage, with arms stretched out to the sides.  Claire struck this pose early in the play, first when she demanded Madame’s dress from Solange, and shortly afterwards, standing down center in an attitude of ecstasy, stating that she was being carried away “By the devil!  He’s carrying me away in his fragrant arms.  He’s lifting me up, I leave the ground, I’m off . . .”  Much later in the play, after Madame (George Sutton) had returned and left, Claire, again as “Madame,” uses this stance when she was waiting for Solange to bring her her tea: “Madame must have her tea.”  Finally, in her closing monologue, Solange repeated the gesture, this time far up right at the window in the adjoining room.

The second visual Theme was a frequent juxtaposition of the women on stage in which one stood down center with the other (and, in one case two others) kneeling in front of her.  During Claire’s first masquerade as Madame, Solange, while dressing her sister in Madame’s purple gown, knelt to arrange the fall of the dress.  Later, after Solange had assumed the dominant role in the masquerade, she grabbed Claire around the neck and forced her sister to kneel in front of her.

During the second masquerade, Solange, using a wire whip, again forced Claire to her knees before her—this time onto all fours.  But the most striking variation of this repetition occurred while the maids were undressing Madame.  Both servants ended on their knees down center facing Madame standing up stage of them. 

The third and most pervasive blocking Theme in the production was the use of the two hanging wire mesh “mirrors.”  All of the characters spoke into the mirrors frequently, using them as a means of communication in three different ways.  In the two most direct ways in which the mirrors were used, characters talked to themselves or referred to someone not on stage.  In the most dynamic use of the mirrors, one character talked to another who was on stage by addressing her reflection in the mirror.  However it was used, the repeated business of talking into the mirror was common throughout the production, starting with Claire’s opening lines to Solange: “Those gloves!  Those eternal gloves!”  There were some dozen or more instances following this opening moment, involving all three characters in all three uses at one time or another.  Here is a sample of the more outstanding moments where the technique was used:

  

 CLAIRE (to Solange behind her): Am I to be at your mercy for having denounced Monsieur to the police, for having sold him? . . .

 CLAIRE (to Solange behind her): I see the marks of a slap, but now I’m more beautiful than ever! . . .  Danger is my halo, Claire, and you, you dwell in darkness . . . .

SOLANGE (referring to Madame who is not present): . . . . Look, just look how she suffers.  How she suffers in Beauty.  Grief transforms her, doesn’t I?  Beautifies her? . . .

CLAIRE (to Solange behind her): . . . . I’m capable of anything, you know.

MADAME (referring to Monsieur): . . . . I’d follow him from place to place, from prison to prison, on foot if need be, as far as the penal colony.

MADAME (to herself): . . . . And what about you, you fool, will you be beautiful enough to receive him?  No wrinkles, eh? . . .

MADAME (to Claire behind her): You’re trying to kill me with your tea and your flowers and your suggestions . . . .

CLAIRE (to Solange behind her): I said the insults!  Let them come, let them unfurl, let them drown me, for, as you well know, I loathe servants . . . .

SOLANGE (referring to Madame who has left):  . . . . What?  Oh, Madame needn’t feel sorry for me.  I’m Madame’s equal and I hold my head up high    . . . .

CLAIRE (to Solange behind her): You’re talking too much, my child.  Far too much.  Shut the window.  Draw the curtains.  Very good, Claire!

As we saw a clear example of visual Parallelism in the opening moment, the closing moment contained an instance of another visual structure.  Combining Memory and Expectancy, it harked back to the opening ritual Solange performed before the dialogue even started.  At the beginning of the second masquerade sequence, Solange knelt again at her “altar” and lit her candles.  This was immediately reminiscent of the opening sequence (Memory structure) and also led us to expect her to mask herself as she had done at the beginning in order to play “Claire” to Claire’s “Madame” (Expectancy structure).  In fact, Solange did not remask, but the Expectation was nonetheless strong, and, because she held the mask in her hand for several minutes after Claire’s masked re-entrance, we kept waiting for her to put it on and enter the game as she did in the first scene.

Though there appeared to be some significance to the use of color (the flowers, the purple gown, Solange’s red slip, and Madame’s brown suit and fur cape), it seemed more connected to the meaning than the structure of the production.  And though the masks themselves were indicative of Levels in the performance, that seemed to belong more to the realm of verbal structure than to the purely visual.  The masks in this case merely aided in distinguishing the Levels in acting style, but did not create those Levels themselves by visual means.  Aside from the two salient examples of nonthematic structure, the major structural dynamics in the production, then, were those of repeated gesture, pose and blocking, which, in the three types mentioned, gave a unified—or structured—style to the performance.

A Note About 'Hamilton'

by Kirk Woodward

[I’m envious that Kirk has seen Hamilton because I haven’t yet.  On the other hand, though, I'm mighty glad, his having seen the hottest ticket in town, that he’s elected o share some of his conclusions with ROT and its readers.  I would feel that way even if Kirk had merely written an ordinary report on the performance as he’s done before on occasion (see “An American in Paris (Part 2),” 13 November 2015, and “Something Rotten! 1,” 11 May 2016—not that they’re really ordinary).  But Kirk has carved out a notion concerning the hip-hop musical which he says he hasn’t seen covered before and has devoted “A Note About Hamilton” to discussing a fascinating angle on the play and the production.  In addition to being an analysis of one aspect of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, “Note” serves as a suggestion for playwrights of both musicals and straight plays about freedom of expressive form.

[While reading his article, a certain parallel to Kirk’s idea occurred to me, and following his discussion, I’ll have a few thoughts to express myself.  If you can manage to wait till then, consider Kirk Woodward’s thoughtful examination of one element of Hamilton, albeit a central one, and see what you think.]

One cold day in November 2015 I walked from work to the box office of the Broadway musical Hamilton and asked for the next available tickets. I saw the show on that next available date, October 12, 2016.

Eleven months isn’t all that long a time to wait to see a musical as good as Hamilton. It doesn’t need any more praise from me; it’s gotten plenty already. It opened at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Broadway on August 6, 2015, after an initial sold out run at the Joseph Papp Public Theater (January 20–May 3,  2015), and seems likely to run forever. It has won an astonishing number of prizes, including eleven Tony Awards.

So the show doesn’t need any help from me, but I do have one observation I haven’t seen made elsewhere, although, considering the amount written about the show, it probably has been made someplace. It’s difficult to describe, but I think it’s worthwhile to consider.

As everyone knows, Hamilton uses hip hop musical styles, including extensive sections of rap music, as it tells the story of the life of Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804), the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury. It’s not the first show to employ hip hop music; notably, Lin-Manuel Miranda (b. 1980), the author and composer of the musical Hamilton, used rap extensively in his score for the musical In the Heights, which ran successfully on Broadway from 2008 to 2011.

Rap, Salsa, and similar forms of music are appropriate musical forms for In the Heights, which takes place in the largely Latino-populated Washington Heights area of Manhattan. However, hip hop music was unknown during the lifetime of Alexander Hamilton, and for quite a while afterward. Why is its use in Hamilton so successful?

One answer involves a theatrical phenomenon seldom seen and highly prized: the show is embodied in an approach so surprising and yet so appropriate that it might be described as a new theatrical language.

Instances of this phenomenon are few and far between. The first of which I am aware is Peter Brook’s unforgettable production of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970) for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Brook used international circus techniques to embody the magical elements of the play. (An example, a video of a few moments that I’ve remembered since I originally saw the production, can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-XdfK0ntHwn.)

Brook did not just come up with a “concept” for his production of the play; he embodied the play in an entirely new “world” with its own “language.” Although Shakespeare could not possibly have had Brook’s idea in mind, Brook’s production seemed integral to the play, as though the story could hardly exist without it.

The same is true of Hamilton. One can imagine other plays about the first Treasury Secretary’s life. In the musical, however, hip hop sensibility and Hamilton’s sensibility seem to be one and the same. That unity of presentation seems to me to be the factor that links an “interpreted” work like Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and an “original” work like Hamilton: both seem to spring from the very essences of the characters, instead of being imposed on them.

Directors often come up with “concepts” for their productions. Frequently these end up being nothing much more than new settings for the plays. That is not what happens in Hamilton, which creates a whole “world” in which its story exists.

The difference between a “concept production” and a “new theatrical language” can be seen in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that Jon Jory directed at Actors Theatre of Louisville (ATL) in 1971, shortly after Brook’s production opened.

Whereas Brook invented, in effect, an entirely new context for Shakespeare’s play through the use of international circus techniques, Jory set his production in a circus. This kind of “concept,” described by the critic Eric Bentley as a “Bright Idea,” imposes a setting on a play, and seldom feels organic. Examples abound in opera, with, for example, Wagner’s Ring Cycle playing host to Nazis, hippies, industrialists, and so on.

Jory’s “concept” was imposed on Shakespeare’s play instead of seeming to inhabit it, and the result was comic, as when, in the first act, the lion tamer of the circus pleaded with the ringmaster to put his daughter to death for falling in love with a roustabout – surely a first in circus history.

Jory is a fine director, but at least with that production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream he fell into a trap that regularly presents itself to directors in our time – to do something to, in effect, “make a play interesting,” as though that were necessary for a play that is interesting, or possible to do with a play that is not.

Still, extraordinary artists do extraordinary things in theater. Julie Taymor (b. 1952) has demonstrated in her production of The Lion King, which opened on Broadway in 1997, that she is one of them. So is Peter Brook, and so without a doubt, at least in the case of Hamilton, is Lin-Manuel Miranda, a fact that may go a long way toward explaining that musical’s popularity.

[With regard to Kirk’s point, I agree: I don’t recall having read anyone else who’s made this observation about Hamilton.  I want to make a comment on what I think he’s saying, however—in particular about Miranda’s using ”an approach so surprising . . . that it might be described as a new theatrical language.”  

[I ran an article on ROT called “Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage” (18 September 2009) which I followed with the republication of a New York Times article by Robert Brustein called “Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?” (6 November 1988, sec. 2 [“Arts and Leisure”]: 5, 16; posted on ROT on 10 March 2011) on which my post was based.  What Kirk describes as Miranda’s “surprising approach” for Hamilton is encompassed by what I contend Brustein means by theatrical metaphor.  Note particularly Kirk’s paragraph about the “world” Peter Brook created for Midsummer Night’s Dream and Brustein’s definition of theatrical metaphor.  (Brustein even uses Brook’s Midsummer as a prime example of metaphorical theater.)  “Poetic metaphor,” writes Brustein, “attempts to penetrate the mystery of a play in order to devise a poetic stage equivalent” through which to generate “provocative theatrical images . . . that are suggestive of the play rather than specific, reverberant rather than concrete.”

[Kirk’s dismissal of other “concepts” is what Brustein defines as “prosaic simile” productions (and what a teacher of mine at Rutgers disparaged as “Hamlet on roller skates.”)  Brustein asserts that simile directors “assume that because a play’s action is like something from a later period, its environment can be changed accordingly.”  Their “innovations are basically analogical—provid­ing at best a platform for ideas, at worst an occasion for pranks.”  Kirk’s subsequent comparison of “concept” and “new language” seems exactly parallel to Brustein’s distinction between “simile” and “metaphor”: Brustein writes that “simile productions are rarely as powerful as those that try to capture the imaginative life of a classic through radical leaps into its hidden, sometimes invisible, depths.”  (Kirk’s description of Jon Jory’s Midsummer at ATL reminds me of an Arturo Ui directed by Carl Weber I saw at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage in 1974 that was also set in a circus.   I distinctly recall Givola—played by Stanley Anderson—in a swing.)

[Now, both Brustein’s and my articles are about adaptations and interpretations of classical plays, not original works, but I think the concept’s the same.  The difference between Miranda and the examples Kirk cites is that Brook and Jory were all (re)interpreting someone else’s existing work while Miranda’s creating his own with the “new language” built in.  Julie Taymor’s Lion King is a hybrid: she reinvented the Disney cartoon, but her stage version’s original; she even “reinvented” (that is, “Africanized”) the music.  Kirk’s view of Hamilton is an extension of Robert Brustein’s view of reinterpretations of classics: it’s an application of the same principle to original work.  If Tennessee Williams is right to call on playwrights to incorporate all the levers of playmaking into their scripts—this is his “plastic theater” concept, on which I blogged in “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theater,” 9 May 2012—then Lin-Manuel Miranda’s on the same theatrical track as Peter Brook and the metaphorical auteur director—Brustein named other great examples: Vsevolod Meyerhold, Bertolt Brecht (also himself a playwright), Ingmar Bergman, Liviu Ciulei. Lucian Pintilie, and Andrei Serban (I would add filmmaker Akira Kurosawa on the basis of his Shakespearean adaptations Throne of Blood [Macbeth] and Ran [King Lear])—who, he explains, “‘authors’ the production much as the au­thor writes the text.”  Miranda—and others who may follow his example—simply integrated his stylistic metaphor, in this instance, the hip-hop medium for telling Alexander Hamilton’s story—into his dramaturgy, just as Williams proposed, instead of turning the task over to a director.] 

'The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World'

[I’ve always reserved the privilege of writing my play reports in a way that spotlights an aspect of the performance that caught my attention.  I don’t write reviews, in any case, so I’m not bound to a standard format or outline.  I haven’t exercised my self-proclaimed privilege often, but Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World is an extraordinary occasion, reportorially speaking.  So what you’ll find below is not the kind of performance report I’ve been posting.  Furthermore, as lengthy as it is, I don’t come even close to saying all I would have liked about the play, the writer, or the production.  Nevertheless, I hope you’ll find my report useful, informative, and even revealing.  If you need a conventional evaluation, there are plenty of reviews on line—and I’ve surveyed a selection (some things don’t change).  Considering how fascinating academic writers have found Suzan-Lori Parks and her work, there are also quite a number of scholarly pieces, including both numerous essays and a few books, that analyze and purport to explain Last Black Man and other Parks plays.  (Some are even readable!)  ~Rick]

Last month, following an incident at the Richard Rodgers Theatre in which the cast of Hamilton addressed a statement to Vice President-Elect Mike Pence in the audience, President-Elect Donald Trump tweeted, “The Theater must always be a safe and special place.”  Well, special, yes—but safe?  Most theater people, including most veteran theatergoers, wouldn’t accept that.  Certainly playwright Suzan-Lori Parks wouldn’t, not for a New York second.  Her entire career is proof that she’s in it to challenge people’s complacencies, invade their comfort zones—and no better illustration of this fact is on display right now at the Pershing Square Signature Center’s Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre.  Believe you me, safety is the last thing Parks is there for.  “Since the early 1990s,” writes Jenna Clark Embrey, Signature Theatre Company’s literary manager, “Parks has incited a revolution in the American theatre with plays that remix history, truth, fantasy, and fables; the worlds that she creates are built on controlled chaos.”

Parks is this season’s Residency One playwright at STC.  This program affords each writer-in-residence multiple productions over a year’s period and the first of Parks’s plays for her Signature residency is her 1990 composition, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, an expressionistic, jazz-influenced stage poem that’s about the history of black America.  Or, more precisely, the eradication of African Americans and their history from the record.  In the words of Nicole Hodges Persley, a scholar of African-American theater, Parks’s history plays (please, don’t think Shakespeare), of which Last Black Man is one, “both exhilarate and confound audiences and critics.”  My companion, Diana, for example, dismissed the performance curtly as “a complete waste of time.”  She was almost angry and couldn’t understand why I found it intriguing.  (I’ll get to that later.)  As the playwright herself says: “Don’t go in there expecting to be served a meal from your mommy’s spoon.  We don’t do that in this show. . . .  Go in there expecting to see the stories come at you from all sides.  It is confusing, like the world is.” 

Parks wrote Last Black Man in 1989 (she says she started it in 1987 or ’88) and the New York Theatre Workshop held a reading of the script in its east Village home on 2 October directed by Beth A. Schachter.  The play premièred at BACA (Brooklyn Arts and Culture Association) Downtown on 13 September 1990 under Schachter’s direction and later was produced at the Yale Repertory Theatre’s WinterFest in New Haven, Connecticut, from 22 January to 7 March 1992, staged by Liz Diamond.  The current Signature revival is the first in New York City since the NYTW reading and the BACA début over a quarter of a century ago—and the first full, professional staging of the work in Manhattan.

Billed at STC as The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World AKA the Negro Book of the Dead, the revival, staged by Lileana Blain-Cruz (Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s War, Lincoln Center Theater; Lucas Hnath’s Red Speedo, NYTW; both 2016) in the 191-seat Griffin, started performances on 25 October and opened on 13 November; it’s currently scheduled to close on 18 December (after two extensions from 4 and 11 December).  Diana and I met at Signature’s Theatre Row home for the 7:30 performance on Wednesday evening, 16 November.  (I’d never seen that subtitle used for any publication or production of Last Black Man before, but Parks explained that it was added for the STC production because when she needed to clarify the title for the actors, she realized “that it needed an addition.”  In an e-mail, Signature’s associate artistic director added that Parks appended the subtitle in September and affirms “that the addition is now part of the complete title.”)

Last Black Man is non-linear in structure, and largely non-narrative.  (Parks’s earliest plays, which include 1987’s Betting on the Dust Commander, 1989’s Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, and Last Black Man, are her most experimental and challenging in form.)   Like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 poem, “Kubla Khan,” The Death of the Last Black Man, says Parks, came to her as a result of a dream.  Waking from a nap, the playwright

stared at the wall: still sort of dreaming.  Written up there between the window and the wall were the words, “This is the death of the last negro man in the whole entire world.”  Written up there in black vapor.  I said to myself, “You should write that down,” so I went over to my desk and wrote it down.  Those words and my reaction to them became a play.

But it’s more than just a dream.  This description is recounted in an essay called “Possession” (published in the same volume, The America Play and Other Works, in which The Death of the Last Black Man appears) and as an epigram to the piece, Parks provides a pair of definitions:

possession.  1. the action or fact of possessing, or the condition of being possessed.  2. the holding or having of something as one’s own, or being inhabited and controlled by a demon or spirit.  

The first meaning comes into play, but for now, it’s the second part of definition 2 that’s important.  Last Black Man is about reclaiming history and the figures—what Parks prefers to call the dramatis personæ—are from the past, from literature, from folk culture, from the Bible—and Parks seems to feel she’s been possessed by these spirits of African-American life, demanding that she tell their story.  “You should write it down because if you dont write it down then they will come along and tell the future that we did not exist,” says a figure called Yes and Greens Black-Eyed Peas Cornbread.  As Parks sees it:

A pay is a blueprint of an event: a way of creating and rewriting history through the medium of literature.  Since history is a recorded or remembered event, theatre, for me, is the perfect place to “make” history—that is, because so much of African-American history has been unrecorded, dismembered, washed out, one of my tasks as playwright is to—through literature and the special strange relationship between theatre and real-life—locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down.

Indeed, Parks did write it down.  What she sees herself doing in plays like Last Black Man is “re-membering,” which means both reclaiming lost history or putting African-Americans back into the historical record from which they’ve been erased and putting back together the black man who’s been systematically dismembered, both metaphorically and even actually. 

This is also where definition 1 above for ‘possession’ applies.  For most of African history in North America, the black man and woman has been a possession; a thing, an object that could be owned by someone else.  They were non-persons, and even after legal emancipation, hardly more than that.  Non-persons have no place in history.  They can’t make accomplishments or contributions.  They have no standing (the 1856-1857 Dred Scott case essentially declared that a slave had no right to bring suit in a U.S. court).  They leave no impression, even—or perhaps especially—when they die.  The question Parks asks is If a black man dies and no one bothers to record it, does his life make an impression on history?  The first half of definition 2 also returns to African Americans the right to their own possessions, including the power to create and own their own stories.  (Are we still in safe territory?)

This is the foundation of Parks’s themes.  With respect to form, the dramatist realizes “that my writing is very influenced by music; how much I employ its methods.”  Parks has explained, “When I wrote [Last Black Man] I was listening to a lot of Ornette Coleman [jazz composer-musician, 1930-2015], The Shape of Jazz to Come, which is a brilliant, brilliant album—and it very much has some jazz motifs in it.  So the play does as well.”  One of the play’s most prominent jazz techniques is “Repetition & Revision,” which Parks defines as “a concept integral to the Jazz esthetic in which the composer or performer will write or play a musical phrase once and again and again; etc.—with each revisit the phrase is slightly revised.”  The playwright continues:

“Rep & Rev” as I call it is a central element in my work; through its use I’m working to create a dramatic text that departs from the traditional linear narrative style to look and sound more like a musical score . . . [.]  How does this “Rep & Rev”—a literal incorporation of the past—impact on the creation of a theatrical experience?

Coleman, whose musicianship was, to say the least, unorthodox, unusual, and unstructured, was a controversial figure in jazz.  (He played a plastic saxophone in his early career!)  He’s considered one of the principal innovators of free jazz, a form of the music that essentially broke the rules of the genre and generally pushed the envelope.  (The term itself was invented by Coleman as the title of a 1960 album, and he never completely accepted it as a label for a type of jazz music, or that his own music should be called “free jazz.”)  My friend Kirk Woodward, who’s been a frequent guest-blogger on ROT, saw Coleman perform (he gets a mention in Kirk’s “Some Of That Jazz,” posted on 7 June 2015) and says of the sax-player that “he’s one of those pioneers that many people detested but then found he’d changed their way of experiencing an art forever.”  (Kirk has also blogged on Parks twice for ROT: “How America Eats: Food and Eating Habits in the Plays of Suzan-Lori Parks,” 5 October 2009—which includes references to Last Black Man—and “A Playwright of Importance,” 31 January 2011.)  Music critic Steve Huey said of the album to which Parks was listening when she wrote Last Black Man, 1959’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, that it “was a watershed event in the genesis of avant-garde jazz, profoundly steering its future course and throwing down a gauntlet that some still haven’t come to grips with.  The record shattered traditional concepts of harmony in jazz . . . .”  Huey wrote that “Coleman’s ideals of freedom in jazz made him a feared radical in some quarters.”  That’s a little like Parks’s position in theater—and, like Parks, Coleman was a Pulitzer Prize-winner (for music in 2007) and a MacArthur (“genius”) Fellow (1994). 

In plays like Last Black Man that are structured around Rep & Rev, explains Parks, “we are not moving from A à B but rather, for example, from A à A à A à B à A.  Through such movement we refigure A.”  This effect is very audible in Blain-Cruz’s production.  Rep & Rev, however, has other applications in Last Black Man in addition to the lines the figures speak.  First, for example, the titular black man dies repeatedly and not always in the same way, so elements of Parks’s story are repeated and revised.  On the macro level, furthermore, the whole theme of The Death of the Last Black Man is a repetition and revision as the history—or non-history—of Africans in America is repeatedly rewritten until it’s eradicated.  Now it’s being revised again and restored.  So Rep & Rev isn’t just a playwriting technique in Last Black Man, it’s the structural foundation and the conceptual rationale. 

In combination with Rep & Rev, Parks also uses call and response, an element of both African and African-American public discourse and music.  This is defined as a “spontaneous verbal non-verbal interaction between speaker and listener in which all of the statements (‘calls’) are punctuated by expressions (‘responses’) from the listener.”  Along with African-American worship (grounded in African ceremonials), it is an integral element of jazz, blues, and hip hop, as well as political rallies and street demonstrations. 

On top of Parks’s musical structure and linguistic legerdemain, the writer roils the text with several other non-linear elements.  One of these is the temporality of Last Black Man.  Time in the play doesn’t move in a straight line—in fact, it twists around and folds back on itself; the play takes place simultaneously in the distant past, the more recent past, today: “Yesterday today next summer tomorrow just uh moment uhgoh in 1317 . . . .”  Parks enhances the confusion of time by mixing up the verb tenses and even composing some forms that defy tense parsing altogether.  In addition, time isn’t the only aspect of Last Black Man  that’s obscured: the play’s location is indeterminate and undecipherable.  At times were in ancient Egypt, 1492, the ante-bellum South, Jim Crow America, more-or-less contemporary U.S. (circa 1990 or 2016, take your pick), outer space, and the hereafter.  If you try to sort this out rationally, it’ll make you crazy and the play will be totally meaningless.  If you accept that Last Black Man takes place in all times and all places at once and just go with that, it works a lot better.  But it’s hardly simple. . . or comfortable.

One of Parks’s influences and models was Ntozake Shange (b. 1948), from whom the younger writer learned to compose in a poetic medium.  (Parks had written songs before turning to playwriting.)  Shange called her 1976 play for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf a “choreopoem,” and the same descriptor could be applied accurately to Last Black Man.  Another literary influence on Parks’s work was playwright Adrienne Kennedy (b. 1931) who showed her the power of writing in contemporary street vernacular—what Parks refers to as “hip-hop, Ebonics, jazz speak.”  (I saw Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro, another abstract performance piece that employs Rep & Rev, at STC last spring and reported on it in “Signature Plays” on 3 June.  I also saw a production of for colored girls directed by Shange in 1995, but it predates ROT and there is no report on it.) 

During the performance, I was very taken with Parks’s use of language, and the physical and verbal imagery she evoked—though some of that, of course, is also creditable to director Blain-Cruz, designers Riccardo Hernandez (set) and Montana Blanco (costumes), and choreographer Raja Feather Kelly.  In fact, Parks eschews stage directions and leaves the movements and placements of the actors “mostly to the director.”  Nonetheless, she takes responsibility for the physical life in her plays:

95 percent of the action, in all of my plays, is in the line of text.  So you don’t get a lot of parenthetical stage direction.  I’ve written, within the text, specific directions to them, to guide their breathing, to guide the way they walk, whether or not they walk, whether or not they walk with a limp, whatever.  They know what to do from what they say and how they say it.  The specifics of it are left up to the actor and the director.  The internals are in the line, the externals are left up to them. 

In the program for Last Black Man, Parks quotes another literary figure who had some impact on her art as well, a few lines from “Dolorous Echo,” a 1965 poem by Beat poet Bob Kaufman (1925-86): “When I die, / I won’t stay / Dead.,” which can be seen as a capsule statement of Last Black Man‘s theme.  Known in France, where his work is still popular, as the “black American Rimbaud,” Kaufman was also a surrealist inspired, like Parks, by jazz music.  So, at least on a superficial level, so far we have a play drawing on jazz—not to mention avant-garde jazz—African-American street speech, Beat poetry, call and response, history and culture as it’s been distorted by popular stereotyping, a temporal Möbius strip, an evanescent location, and stunning (literally) movement and visual imagery.  Oh, and all this is packed into a swift 75 minutes.  It’s certainly not easy going—and, I wouldn’t imagine, what someone looking for an evening’s entertainment would find “safe.”  As Tina Turner memorably proclaimed: “. . . we never ever do nothing nice and easy.  We always do it nice and rough.”

Suzan-Lori Parks was born in 1963 in Fort Knox, Kentucky (“where they keep the gold”), but as the daughter of a career military officer, “grew up all over,” including “quite a while” in Germany, where she went to local schools and became fluent in German.  “We were moving around every year.  So I’m from all over,” says Parks, but “I consider myself a Texan, because my mom’s a West Texan, and we spent a lot of time hanging out in far west Texas.”  After high school in Germany and, while her father was stationed at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, at a prep school near Baltimore, Parks attended Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, one of of the Seven Sisters colleges (the women’s counterpart to the then largely all-male Ivy League), graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in English and German literature in 1985.  Having at first been steered away from studying literature, Parks took up an interest in chemistry, but returned to the writing that had marked her earliest childhood focus, when she wrote poetry and songs.  At Mount Holyoke, the incipient playwright studied under novelist James Baldwin (1924-87) in his first writing course, and he encouraged her to consider writing for the stage. 

When the young writer started with Baldwin, she was writing novels, short stories, and songs, but when she read her stories aloud in class, she says, “I was very animated.  Like I would do what the stupid theatre people did, like ‘Laaa Laaaa Leyy!  And Read Alouddd!  And tell the characters and then paint the scene!  And do all this stuff!’”  So her teacher said to her, “‘Ms. Parks, have you ever thought about writing for the theatre?’  And gave me that look . . . [.]  I started writing for the theatre that day, that very day.”  After Mount Holyoke, the young writer studied acting for a year at the Drama Studio London in order to understand the stage better.  Since her stage début (The Sinner's Place, written at Mount Holyoke in 1984, while she was still a student), Parks (whose given name is spelled with a ‘z’ due to a misprint in an early show flyer—which she just kept) has so far written 18 plays (plus a revision of the book for George and Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward’s Porgy and Bess, but not counting all 365 plays of 2006-07’s 365 Days/365 Plays), two screenplays, a novel, and numerous essays; she has several projects in the works, according to her own account, including a series for Amazon and a musicalization of the 1972 Jamaican reggae film, The Harder They Come, for the stage.  She continues (since 2011) weekly to perform (and live-stream) Watch Me Work, a meditation on the artistic process and an actual work session during which Parks works on her latest project in the lobby of the Joseph Papp Public Theater before a live audience who get to ask questions during the last 15 minutes of the piece. 

In 2001, Parks received a MacArthur Fellowship (the “genius grant”) and the following year became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Topdog/Underdog (Public Theater, 2001; Broadway, 2002).  Topdog/Underdog also won the 2002 Drama Desk Award and the 2002 Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Playwriting Award and was nominated for a best-play Tony; Parks was nominated for two additional Pulitzers: in 2000 for In the Blood and in 2015 for Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2, 3).  Off-Broadway, the playwright received a nomination for the 2015 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play for Father Comes Home and won the 1995-1996 OBIE Award for Playwriting for Venus.  (Venus, which I saw at the Public in 1996 before I wrote regular reports, will be seen at Signature in the spring of 2017.  I also saw the Broadway production of Topdog, but there’s no report on that, either.)  To date, the dramatist has garnered over a dozen awards, honors, and nominations during her career, including the Academy of Achievement Golden Plate Award (2007), the NAACP Theatre Award for Ray Charles Live! (2008), and the Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History for Father Comes Home (2015).  Parks teaches playwriting at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in the Rita & Burton Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing and is the first holder of the Master Writer Chair at the Public Theater in New York City. 

Parks loved to write even as a child, though she points out that no one in her family was a writer; her brother and sister would be playing outside, she recounts, while she’d be hanging out inside, “writing my novel.”  She says she doesn’t write so much because she has something she has to say (though from the evidence of her plays I’d dispute that as a categorical denial), but rather because the act of writing “is so . . . like it’s a funnel.  And it pulls my energy.”  When she’s inspired, she says to herself, “‘Wow, I just gahh, oh yo, I gotta write this!’  Because there’s a funnel of energy, a cone of energy that’s like pulling me toward it.” 

The Death of the Last Black Man, says Parks, is

about a man and his wife, and the man is dying. . . .  This man is dead and his wife is basically trying to find his final resting place.  There’s a reoccurring question in the play: “Where’s he gonna go now that he done dieded?”  And what they find at the end is that his final resting place is a play called The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World.  It’s like a funeral mass in a way.

This is where the lines from Kaufman’s poem apply (“When I die, / I won’t stay / Dead”).  The figure around whom the play revolves, Black Man With Watermelon, essentially the title character insofar as Last Black Man has one, suffers serial deaths throughout history; on stage he’s hanged/strangled and electrocuted.  The Black Woman With Fried Drumstick, the black man’s partner, describes his death(s):

Yesterday today next summer tomorrow just uh moment uhgoh in 1317 dieded thuh last black man in thuh whole entire world.  Uh!  Oh.  Don’t be uhlarmed.  Do not be afeared.  It was painless.  Uh painless passin.  He falls twenty-three floors to his death.

Just as the black man’s life has been erased from the public and historical record, his contributions discounted and ignored, his death(s) is (are) deemed inconsequential. 

But as far as the dramaturgy goes, the author suggests that we “think of jazz music first of all, think of like free jazz—it moves like that.  It’s not like a tidy, well-made play that we’re accustomed to seeing in traditional theatre.  Think of poet’s theatre, slam poetry, hiphop, like a poetry slam.”  The jazz medium “dovetails very much with current language today.  This street language, urban language, creative language that we use.”  It’s not just in the form, however, where Last Black Man resonates, but in its content as well—which is why I suspect that Parks is being modest when she says she doesn’t write because she has something to say.  (The writer’s said that she considers form and content the same thing.)  The playwright continues with her explanation of Last Black Man:

But it’s also dovetailing with some of the current events, the difficult current events that are going on in our country today.  They weren’t so apparent and on the surface back in 1990.  It was always there, but now it’s kind of on everybody’s Twitter feed. Revisiting this play now felt like, “Wow this is going to be cool, there’s more to this than I remember.  There’s a lot to this.”  It felt very current, it felt like I’d written it a couple of years ago.

Some of the lines in the play seemed so current, I wondered if Parks had done some revising for the Signature remount, but that’s apparently not the case:

Because there’s this part in the play, this thing where the man is talking about how he can’t breathe.  There’s a rope around his neck and he’s dying yet another death, and he says, “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.”  And I’m just like, “oh, that sounds familiar . . . [.]”

The words “I can’t breathe” clearly echo the 2014 death of Eric Garner on Staten Island at the hands of New York City police who placed him in a choke hold.  No one who hears the lines today can miss the reference, even if Parks wrote them in 1989.  The appearance of Black Man With Watermelon with a noose around his neck, however, may be less obvious in its contemporary allusion. (Of course, the image of lynchings during the Jim Crow era, which is what Parks doubtlessly had in mind in 1989, is unambiguous.  To be sure this allusion is clear, set designer Hernandez dominated the sage with a huge tree branch running diagonally from the down right floor level to the up left fly space.  It’s virtually the only scenery in the Signature revival of Last Black Man.)   In 2007, there was a well-publicized incident on the campus of Columbia University in New York in which a noose was found hanging on the office doorknob of an African-American faculty member; and last year, a student hung a noose from a tree in front of the student center at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.  The noose, like the burning cross and the Ku Klux Klan hood, remains a potent symbol of intimidation and subjugation of African Americans and a tool of rendering black Americans non-persons, and many other incidents in the past dozen years have made the news.

There are also frequent references to Black Man’s hands being bound, which call to mind not only the leather straps used to secure the hands of a condemned man in an electric chair, which figures prominently in Last Black Man, or the rope with which a black man’s hands were bound behind him when he was lynched, but also slave shackles and, with a current connection, police handcuffs—such as those which Freddie Gray was wearing while in custody when he died in the back of the police van in Baltimore last year.

Of course, the very theme of The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, the repeated and serial deaths suffered by African Americans, their apparent expendability both in the historical record and in life itself, is one of the most current topics in our society right now.  It’s Sanford, Florida (the figure And Bigger And Bigger And Bigger, an incarnation of Bigger Thomas from Richard Wright’s Native Son—and Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son—but also a reflection of the white fear of the big, strong black “buck,” wears a black hoodie, a design element that points to the 21st century); Ferguson; Cleveland; Baltimore; Staten Island; and other cities where unarmed black people, including several women, were killed by police or other authorities—or in the case of Charlotte, a homegrown terrorist.  It’s  Back Lives Matter. 

Even a repeated line by Black Man With Watermelon has resonance that probably didn’t ring with an audience in 1990: “The black man moves his hands.”  What resonated now, at least for me, is the implication that this action is the excuse police officers have used for those shootings of unarmed black men: they were reaching for something presumed to be a gun.  It’s not what Parks intended the words to mean, but that’s what I heard. 

In a “Playwright Letter” published in Signature’s Study Guide for The Death of Last Black Man, Parks even asks, “Are there any things going on stage that reminded you of current events?”  Isn’t that what good plays, good art, does?  It refers to our lives today even if the play was written years, decades, even centuries ago.  I don’t think you can legitimately dismiss a play that can do that.  Not if you’re honest . . . and paying attention.  (Sorry, Diana.)  And I also don’t think you can take refuge in a theater where that kind of play is on stage.  That’s not a safe, comfortable, or unchallenging place.  And it never should be.  (Sorry, Donald.)

Actually, I’m not in the least sorry.  It’s what I love about theater and art.  It’s why I go to the theater and art museums, and read books and essays.  It’s why I have this blog.  And it’s why I’m a First Amendment absolutist.  But that’s an argument for another day.

The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World is a peculiar play, to say the least.  I can’t do a standard description and evaluation, so I’ll sketch it out very broadly and say only that I found it exhilarating as a theater piece.  (To quote the reviewer of another revival some years ago, “To call ‘Death’ a play is like calling a Jackson Pollock painting a landscape.”)  The stage of the little Griffin Theatre is raked and at preset, there’s no curtain.  As I noted earlier, the main set piece of Hernandez’s scenic design is the huge tree limb that bisects the stage.  A vintage wooden electric chair sits up left beneath the branch.  A hangman’s noose drops from the branch ominously.  Yi Zhao’s lighting is stark, as if the sun were directly overhead; nothing is obscured—or softened—by shadow. The floor of the sloped portion of the stage is covered with sand or loose dirt, like a huge sandbox or parched landscape—reminiscent, perhaps, of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s; below this is a narrow strip of level stage at the front of the playing area.  Two chairs are down front, slightly right of center; in the one farther right sits Black Man With Watermelon (Daniel J. Watts), dressed in coveralls like a sharecropper of the ’30s, barefoot and holding an immense green watermelon in his lap.  He looks dead.  In a rocking chair to his left sits Black Woman With Fried Drumstick (Roslyn Ruff), dressed in a work shift of the same period as her counterpart.  She wears a knotted kerchief on her head “Aunt Jemima” style.

The performance begins with what Parks labels in the script an Overture, like a symphony or musical theater, and all the figures of the play identify themselves themselves and preview a little of their signature lines we’ll be hearing more of later: Lots of Grease and Lots of Pork (Jamar Williams), Queen-Then-Pharaoh Hatshepsut (Amelia Workman), And Bigger and Bigger and Bigger (Reynaldo Piniella), Prunes and Prisms (Mirirai Sithole), Ham (Patrena Murray), Voice on Thuh Tee V (William DeMeritt), Old Man River Jordan (Julian Rozzell), Yes and Greens Black-Eyed Peas Cornbread (Nike Kadri), and Before Columbus (David Ryan Smith).  (Each of these figures, as suggested by their names, is an archetype of some aspect of lost black history, black stereotyping, and black pop-culture imagery and there’s so much to say about them that it just won’t fit here.)  They move in highly rhythmic choreography from Raja Feather Kelly, clothed in evocatively stylized costumes by Montana Blanco (one stand-out example: DeMeritt as “Broad Caster,” the TV news anchor, is dressed to look like Malcolm X) as they speak Parks’s idiosyncratic vernacular poetry based on stereotypical (and exaggerated) black English, a travesty of 19th- and early 20th-century minstrelsy.  The New York Times’ Ben Brantley wrote that Parks’s words “suggest tragedy told as a joke.”

It’s not visible (or audible) in the performance, but Last Black Man proceeds not by traditional scenes, but what Parks calls panels and choruses, each of which is a Rep & Rev of the one that went before.  Thus, the playwright deconstructs and then reconstructs the story of black people in America, showing both how they’ve been portrayed in popular culture and how absurd that portrayal has been.  Even as the panels repeat themselves in slightly altered ways, the figures, especially Black Man, resist the prescribed roles—Black Man refuses to stay dead, after all—and Parks resists a conclusive ending.  (Black Man’s repeated dying and returning surely suggests Jesus Christ, especially since Parks, who went to a Catholic prep school for high school, equates the play’s panels with the Stations of the Cross.)  The last line, “Hold it. Hold it.  Hold it.  Hold it.  Hold it.  Hold it.  Hold it,” plays as if all the figures don’t accept the final action—the death yet again of the last black man—and are about to rewind and go again.  Will it break the cycle and change this time?  Or will it play out yet again in the same way?  We don’t know. 

Even at only an hour and a quarter, Last Black Man is so dense and packed full of shiny moments of theater, meaning, symbolism, imagery, wisdom, and admonition that I can’t come near doing it justice in a blog report—even one that’s bound to go long.  I’ll add, too, that it stayed with me for weeks after I saw it, leaving me to go over it again and again in my mind and continue to try to sort it out long after I left the theater.  I can’t even do right by the excellent production here; the kaleidoscope of staging, performance, design, and language often left me in sensory overload—and I mean that in the best possible way.  (The best way to experience this play is to see it once and just let the presentation wash over you like some kind of hyper-aroma therapy, and then go back again, maybe a few days or a week later, and try to observe the details.)  So, in lieu of assessing the performances and the tech as I usually do, let me just capsulize: the acting ensemble was startling from first to last (Variety’s Frank Rizzo proclaimed the cast “charismatic”), Blain-Cruz guided them superbly and imaginatively at every turn, and the designers pulled out all the stops and made a visually dazzling show that paralleled both the acting and the writing.  What’s more, it all worked together like a perfect symbiosis.  The Death of the Last Black Man may not be a play in the conventional sense—but it damn sure is theater!

As of 30 November, Show-Score has surveyed 25 reviews for an average score of 75.  The tally included 76% positive notices (high score: 95 – websites Theatre is Easy and Front Row Center; four 90’s), 4% negative (low score: 35 - Hollywood Reporter), and 20% mixed.  (My round-up includes 19 reviews.)

Joe Dziemianowicz of New York’s Daily News characterized Signature’s Last Black Man as “bold and striking, but frustrating,” explaining, “One is left to grapple and wonder, What's going on?”  The Newsman added, “Then again, maybe that’s [Parks’s] point.”  In Long Island’s Newsday, Linda Winer’s “Bottom Line” was: “Tough, prescient Parks revival—historical pageant and poetry slam.”  On the evidence of Last Black Man, she called Parks “uncompromising, strenuous and stylistically daring,” adding, “She also was eerily prophetic.”  Dubbing the STC revival “expert,” thanks to director Blain-Cruz’s “self-mocking and serious production, as much of an ordeal as an enchantment.”

Calling the play “dark and forbidding,” the Times’ Brantley wrote that the STC revival of Parks’s “phantasmagorical theater piece” is “a sepulchral parade of images:  Saying that the play “sometimes feels like a senior semiotics project,” Brantley described it as a “combination of willful opacity and obvious symbolism” which “can feel tedious if you strain to make sense of it.”   His suggestion was to “give yourself over to the sensory flow of Ms. Blain-Cruz’s production” so that “the play acquires the eerie inevitability of a fever dream from which there is truly no waking.”  The Timesman reported that Blain-Cruz’s staging is “hypnotic,” Blanco’s “bright, cartoonish” costumes “might have stepped out of a child’s illustrated history book from the mid-20th-century,” and Hernandez’s set is a “shadowland” lit by Zhao “with the dark starkness of a bad dream.”

The Death of the Last Black Man “feels like a bad dream,” declared Max McGuinness in the U.S. edition of the Financial Times.  “Frequently it’s difficult to make out quite what is going on,” McGuinness continued, but then added, “And yet certain grim themes come into sharper relief.”  “Under Lileana Blain-Cruz’s precise direction,” the FT reviewer reported, the actors “bring that dark vision to haunting life” with “exquisitely restrained movement.”  McGuinness suggested “a little more variety” in the cast’s delivery, and he found too much monologue over dialogue, “but all this is never less than engaging,” he concluded.  His final judgement was: “This revival offers a powerful tonic at a time when America’s divisions seem starker than ever.”  In the New Yorker, Hilton Als characterized Last Black Man as an “exceptional production” directed by a “great new talent.”

In the Village Voice, Miriam Felton-Dansky called STC’s Last Black Man “an exquisite production” of “a surreal, poetic meditation” in which “[h]istory repeats itself . . . directly—and more heartbreakingly.”  While Last Black Man “evoke[s] music and painting more than drama, the play riffs on language and remixes racial stereotypes with boldness and grace,” observed Felton-Dansky, “creating an experience that is both revelatory and irresistibly watchable.”  The Voice reviewer asserted of the content of the play, “These histories are bleak, but watching Parks's play is not” as Parks transforms “history into disturbing, evocative ritual.”  “Sometimes, with a good-enough playwright, it’s good to have no idea what’s going on,” observed Jesse Green at the top of his New York magazine review.  “That was the case for me with Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World.”  He confirmed that the Signature revival is “a stupendous staging” which has been “superbly directed” by Blain-Cruz “and designed” by Hernandez, Blanco, and Zhao.  Green concluded that “it may not be pretty, or even coherent, but it’s beautiful.”

“Surreal doesn’t begin to describe watching Suzan-Lori Parks’s postmodern vaudeville of African-American stereotypes the day after Trump was elected,” declared David Cote in Time Out New York.. The man from TONY called the play a “jazzy, poetic fever dream” which warps “temporality and dialect to create music and noise.”  Cote warned that Last Black Man, ”a jagged, angry, weird text,” “is not an easy play to dissect or digest,” but director Blain-Cruz “stages it in high style, with a skin-prickling soundscape by Palmer Hefferan . . . and a raft of brave in-your-face performances.”  Frank Scheck of the Hollywood Reporter lamented in his “Bottom Line,” “Despite an excellent production, this frustratingly oblique and elliptical play never comes into focus.”  He explained that he had resorted to consulting the text to “decipher” the play, but he acknowledged, “Sadly, even going to the printed page left me flummoxed.”  The HR reviewer proclaimed, “Dense, abstruse and elliptical, the piece is virtually incomprehensible,” though he allows that “theatergoers who prefer [Coleman’s style of free] jazz . . . may be more receptive to its challenges.”  The “endless repetition” of the language may provide “the linguistic equivalent of jazz improvisations,” however, “a little of it goes a long way” and the play’s “70 minutes . . . feels like an eternity.”  Scheck declared that “when the evening is over you’ll be longing for regression therapy,” adding as a final complaint, ‘The energetic dance sequences, choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly and frequently performed to deafening electronic music, don't help.”  Although the cast “go through their demanding physical and verbal paces with admirable energy” and the “production elements are also first-rate,”  Scheck’s final assessment was that though “the piece works on a certain visceral level, its failure to communicate its intellectual themes in remotely coherent fashion diminishes its intended power.”

In Variety, Rizzo characterized Last Black Man as a “symbol-laden, language-rich, ritualistic play” with “many powerful images” that generate a “dramatic and haunting effect in this handsomely staged, evocative revival” at STC.  With her “stylized, fragmented and elliptical” language, Parks “weaves a woozy spell.”  Rizzo warned, “Your response to the work might parallel how you feel about a free-form jazz session, one filled with meditative riffs and theatrical flourishes.”  Even Blain-Cruz’s “hypnotic” direction and the “talented” acting company, however, have trouble creating “an emotional bond [that] lasts longer than an impulse.”  When they do, though, such as in the play’s final scene, “it’s a heartbreaking revelation.”  In the end, the Variety review-writer warned that “‘Death of the Last Black Man’ may still be challenging for some audiences as they try to make connections,” though “others will find the experience resonating down to their bones, rich with meaning of their own making.” 

Charles Nechamkin of Stage Buddy contended that, like the other actors in Last Black Man, “Black Man With Watermelon . . . doesn’t seem to understand the part he’s been cast in.”  Nechamkin also determined that “the audience struggles to break through these stereotypes to the people underneath” (apparently the reviewer took a survey) and even claimed that Parks “struggles with us.”  The play’s dialogue, said our Stage Buddy, is “a jumble of words: lyrical, emotional, tautological,” yet he labeled the show “compelling.”  The Signature revival is an “energetic production,” but “it’s the relationship between Black Man With Watermelon and Black Woman With Fried Drumstick . . . that anchors us and gives us something human to hold onto.”  The “other characters . . . aren’t characters at all, they’re refrains.”  It’s as if, said Nechamkin, we’d “stumbled upon the funeral procession of a stranger”: “We’re overwhelmed by a vague but familiar sense of loss.”  The SB reviewer posited, “It makes for a challenging and abstruse piece of theater, one that may not be satisfying to those seeking a neat and moralizing social drama,”  adding that “even the most patient and open-minded audience member will come away with more questions than answers.”  Still, he concluded, “Even so, there’s something valuable and vital here.”

On New York Theatre Guide, Margret Echeverria decided that Last Black Man “is one of these pieces of art” that “turn themselves over and over living actively in our memories for a very long time to reveal new truths, new beauty, new troublesome anomalies.”  Echeverria admitted, however, that she may not be “qualified to write this review” because she’s white and feels ignorant about much of the history in Parks’s play.  So she proceeded to describe “what I experienced.”  (I’ve done that, too, under similar circumstances.)  She praised the performances lavishly and reported that Blain-Cruz “directs an ensemble that pulls our back off our seat cushion to listen and watch closely.”  In the end, Echeverria confessed, “I enjoyed the whole painful thing” and “I turn it over and over again in my memory discovering more truths.”  Matthew Murray of Talkin’ Broadway called the Signature production of Last Black Man “a credible but not quite electrifying” revival of a “fascinating but scattershot play.”  The TB review-writer described Hernandez’s set as “bleak,” Blanco’s costumes as running “a wide fantasy gamut.” Zhao’s lights as “piercing,” and Hefferan’s sound as “eerie, cathedral-like.”  Though Murray found Parks’s point “powerful,” he felt “a little of it does go a long way,” and as short as it is, Last Black Man  “feels overlong” to the reviewer.  Murray felt that “this isn't a play that much develops or focuses on finely honing its statements,” and that “the archetypal characters” are limited in their scope.  He also deemed “the performances . . . closer to library-tome dusty than . . . theatrically vivid.” 

Jonathan Mandell, calling Last Black Man “striking,” dubbed Parks’s play “surreal and cryptic” on New York Theatre.  The play “offers searing imagery mixed with repetitive auditory gibberish,” said Mandell, suggesting that “for most of us, I suspect, the appeal of ‘Last Black Man’ rests largely with the production values.”  In CurtainUp, Elyse Sommer declared that Last Black Man represents “Parks at her most inaccessible,” naming among its negatives, “the hard to get a handle on . . . narrative with at times undecipherable dialogue.”  The “ensemble is excellent,” the costumes are “witty,” and the set is “simple but effective.”  Though well produced, felt Sommer, Blain-Cruz’s “handsome, music-infused production isn’t enough to offset the inaccessibility of the experience.”  She found the repeated aspects of the production “all too often come across as just plain repetitious,” but the “vivacious performances and staging keep the audience engaged—even when more than a little confused.”  Describing the play as a “free-form dramatic riff,”  Michael Dale  asserted on Broadway World that Blain-Cruz’s “mock-celebratory pageant-like production is performed by a fine ensemble whose tongues are nimbly set within their cheeks.”  Dale suggested that “the exact intention of the piece may not be easy to grasp, but it's still to be admired as an uninhibited abstract collage.” 

David Roberts of Theatre Reviews Limited reported (rather floridly) that Last Black Man “captures the attention of the audience and holds captive its aching heart and sin-sick soul for a powerfully unforgettable seventy minutes of cathartic ghoulish disquietude.”  At STC, Blain-Cruz’s direction is “meticulous,” Hernandez’s set  is “looming,” Blanco’s costumes are “surreal” and “compress history and its archetypes into a collage of color and form,” and Zhao’s lighting is “imaginative” and “brings [the play] into an alarmingly sharp focus that sears the memory of the audience.”  On TheaterMania, Hayley Levitt warned that Last Black Man “is not the mindless escapism audiences are likely to be craving right now.”  Levitt continued, “Instead of letting you off the hook, it holds your feet right to the fire” and “if you’re up for a mental and emotional challenge, Parks’ poetic one-act is worth meditating on at this unsettled social and political juncture.”  The TM reviewer likens Parks’s poetic monologues to “a spoken-word symphony” and the physical environment is enhanced by Hernandez’s “sparse set” and projection designer Hannah Wasileski’s “haunting shadows.”  She warned theatergoers, however, that “Parks’ text is doubly abstract and is likely to lose you along the way.”  Levitt found, though, that the “tender relationship between Watts and Ruff’s characters [Black Man and Black Woman] is the only accessible element of the play and succeeds in bringing out the human emotion that the other noncharacters lack.” 

Proclaiming Last Black Man “eerily prescient,” Jennifer Vanasco of WNYC, a National Public Radio station in New York City, calls it a “fever dream of a play” which “has a timeless quality.”  The production is “more like a dance piece or a symphony than a traditional narrative story.”  The times have caught up with Last Black Man, Vanasco asserted, making it seem more relevant today than in 1990; the WNYC reviewer stated, “Few works have ever seemed more relevant in our political moment—or as worth seeing.”