The family drama. It is everything to experience on stage. Multiple lives threaded through myriad experiences to tell a story with indelible characters. Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin In The Sun” is an expertly layered portrait of a family struggling in a place that is not just small - but offers no room for growth. Where the six generations of the Younger family need to be is always just out of reach. That tension is not just palpable, but universal.
In 1983, Frank Rich of the New York Times wrote “this is the play that changed theatre forever.” Family dramas have a rich history on stage. However, Hansberry (creating from her own life) sought to give every character, no matter how small, multiple dimensions. Perhaps that is why the list of actors who chose these roles reads like a Hall of Fame. Sidney Poitier. Ruby Dee. Ossie Davis. Louis Gossett, Jr. Joe Morton. Debbie Allen. That does not even take into account the multiple revivals and two plays written that follow members of the Younger family into the next chapter of their lives.
As we read the play, we are first included (quite intimately at that) in the events of daily life enough to see the elements of the plot as events that would potentially change our lives too. “A Raisin In The Sun” is not just the American experience - it is more importantly the African-American experience. Like the sum total of The Harlem Renaissance theatre movement, it demonstrates African pride, illuminates “social protest” theatre, and requires minimal staging to be told. Its title even draws its inspiration from Langston Hughes’ 1951 poem “Harlem” (“What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?”)
While it sounds more like a play setup than a path to Pulitzer, a $10 typewriter and a Bessie Smith record were the impetus for arguably the greatest American playwright of the 20th Century. August Wilson was born into a mixed family in an economically depressed neighborhood in Pittsburgh. His search for identity led him to a passion for writing. Unfortunately, his mother wanted him to be a lawyer instead. Disowned and on his own, Wilson devoured the writers of The Harlem Renaissance. At 20, he started to write in saloons often composing on napkins to discretely think and capture the unexpurgated conversations that were flying around him. It was here that Wilson was educated on dialect and writing dialogue that was truthful.
In 1968, with his friend Rob Penny, Wilson started Black Horizon Theater. They would take their early plays to anywhere that would host them: community centers, schools, and tiny theaters. His early visions of writing about real life quickly took shape. When they asked, “Who is directing this,?” Wilson raised his hand for that job and immediately started pouring over the theatre texts in the library.
By the late seventies, his plays were being noticed by small regional theatre groups. In 1978, Wilson moved to St.Paul, MN to write scripts for a science museum. Two years later, Wilson won a fellowship for The Playwrights Center in Minneapolis. During the Eighties, Wilson developed his vision of “The Pittsburgh Cycle” - a series of 10 plays that would tell the story of the 20th Century. From 1982 through 1987, Wilson wrote the first five plays: “Jitney”(revised from an earlier Seventies work), “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “Fences,” “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” and “The Piano Lesson.”
“The Piano Lesson” is exemplary Wilson. Like Hansberry’s “Raisin,” it takes place in a family home with multiple generations. Wilson writes each character both within the time you are encountering them and throughout their complex and often tenuous history. Wilson saw a Romare Bearden painting of a girl at the piano and a woman standing behind her. He thought the words “The Piano Lesson” just “looked nice together.” In addition, he was struck by one line: “Maretha, you go ahead and get your lesson now.”
What unfolds from this inauspicious opening is a family drama, ghost story, period piece, and deeply thought-provoking debate about heritage. All of the elements of African-American Theatre are there in a small part in order to keep Wilson’s vision as accurate as possible. However, this is a story that could affect any family of any culture or background. What makes it unique among other plays is how strident the play is to use African-American culture (songs, familiar familial relations between all of the main characters, and religion - among others) to ask questions of either remembering/cherishing the past, ignoring or even exorcising the past and most importantly what value would the past have if it could somehow open a path to the future.
The female characters in “The Piano Lesson” are some of the strongest you may read. Like Hansberry’s Beneatha from “Raisin,” Berenice’s is strong and defiant. She is not afraid to stand up to her younger brother from Mississippi, Boy Willie, and his brusque behavior and mercurial plans to sell the family piano. The piano found its way into her possession at her uncle Doaker’s house in Pittsburgh where the play takes place. Even the secondary female character Grace, who shows up to be romantically pursued by both Willie Boy and his friend Lyman, shows immediate control of any situation that appears to be wrong. That leaves the males to present various roles of manhood and family standing.
Within any family, it is given that conflict is implicit. The masterful stroke of “The Piano Lesson” is how well Wilson draws it out of mounting tension and the shifting sands of just who is most loyal to whom. We see Doaker, Lyman, Boy Willie, and the play’s comedic relief Whining Boy as a revolving vision of men following their whims as ambitions, and subject to more Id than Ego. In addition, each of the four is a varying degree of impulsiveness. Outside of those gentlemen, the one male everyone seems to see Berenice marrying is Avery, a preacher with a downtown job. The collision between their worlds is also a source of both tension and release.
“The Piano Lesson” is an example of what Wilson will describe to the Princeton Theater Group in 1996 as “sometimes lacerating, sometimes healing truths.” Those same truths echo through Hansberry (and several others we discussed) as well and all still apply today. I kept the plot details to a minimum, in hopes that in reading and/or watching these masterful plays, their full impact would be felt. On the surface, three generations of a family living in a small house on the southside of Chicago or a brother from Sunflower County, MS visiting his headstrong older sister, daughter, and other relocated family in Pittsburgh would be enough in today’s streaming market for several seasons of a series. However, all of those experiences packed into a single play still serve as the best examples of what Wilson envisioned as Theatre educating “because it is art.”
Mik Davis is the record store manager at T-Bones Records & Cafe in Hattiesburg.
New This Week
TEARS FOR FEARS - The Tipping Point
[LP/CD](Concord)
The tale of Tears For Fears is a lengthy one with surprisingly very few albums. Celebrating their 40th year together with their seventh album, Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith are no strangers to laboring for years over a record. After leaving the starting line with a slew of other UK bands finding their ways to mix Goth elements with dark, brooding SynthPop ("Mad World" and "Pale Shelter" remain classics,) they focused their anger toward healing on "Songs From The Big Chair" ("Everybody Wants To Rule The World," "Shout" and the ebullient "Head Over Heels"). Four years passed, and the ornate Beatlesque modern Psychedelic wonderment of "The Seeds of Love" sent them into the Eighties pantheon. What follows is the common period of dissolution. Smith left after "Seeds" and Orzabal carried on solo until 2004. In 2013, they finally started recording again. "The Tipping Point" takes TFT back to that magical summer of 1985 when Orzabal and Smith were writing together with ease. "Break The Man" and its shimmering synths, elastic bass, and woozy breaks sound like a natural for side two of "Big Chair." Orzabal, having lived through the horror of seeing his wife pass away in 2017, is the duo's raw emotion once again. His booming low voice on the folky "No Small Thing" says a lot more than his lyrics do. With Orzabal in the healing survivor role again, Smith's there to smooth things out with him as they both sing on the "Rule The World"-tempoed title cut. "The Tipping Point" is more than modern Art Pop, is it the restoration of the promise they showed thirty years ago.
STURGILL SIMPSON - The Ballad of Dood and Juanita
[LP](High Top Mountain/Thirty Tigers/The Orchard)
Finally. After months of waiting, the vinyl for Sturgill Simpson's most recent album is arriving. As much as his last pair of LPs (two volumes of "Cuttin' Grass" - both high on the list of best sellers here in 2021) were Bluegrass-based, "Dood" continues the trend, also marking Sturgill's first ventures into Gospel and A Capella music. The entire album is structured like a narrative, sequenced much like Willie Nelson's classic "Red Headed Stranger." Perhaps in tribute to him, Sturgill even has Willie as a guest on "Juanita." A welcome addition to the true Country side of his growing canon.
SLAVE feat. STEVE ARRINGTON - Stellar Fungk: The Best of Slave feat. Steve Arrington
[LP](Atlantic/Rhino)
Before the Midwest became the Rust Belt with the abandonment of all those plants and sources of industry, it was also a hotbed for bands playing Rock N'Roll and Funk (Zapp, Lakeside, Heatwave, and more). Like The Ohio Players, Toledo's Steve Arrington led his giant band into a deep-groove, horn-laden danceable FUNK. Their debut album in 1977 was all sizzling percussion (Arrington moved out to Los Angeles before forming the band to learn Latin percussion and play with Coke Escovedo. Pete Escovedo and his daughter Sheila E). With their maximized sound and stripped-down funk, "Slide" topped the R&B charts for an amazing 20 weeks. Arrington and Co. had some huge bass lines and in return have been sampled by Travis Scott ("Slide,") A Tribe Called Quest ("Son of Slide,") De La Soul, Madlib, and even Beck sampled "Coming Soon" on "Earthquake Weather." By their second album "The Concept," they do start to sound like the other Ohio funkers, using vocoder on "Stellar Fungk" but still never hitting one element of their sound (horn, synths, percussion) in the mix too frequently. "Just A Touch of Love" expands the band further adding female singers, further sweetening the mix and sending them up the R&B charts just as Disco is peaking. Into the Eighties, Arrington returned them to muscular funk with more accented vocals ("Stone Jam") resulting in one jam whose synth lines and bouncing groove ("Watching You") would become the basis for Snoop Dogg's immortal "Gin and Juice." By 1981, Arrington would tire of the band and form his own Steve Arrington's Hall of Fame (four other members would leave to form Aurra). Arrington would toughen up his sound with more synths and drum machines, but take new influence from double-tracking his vocals ("Nobody Can Be You") and laying down long chords and slinky keyboard melodies in the style that would become the root of Eighties Pop and R&B. By 1985's "Dancin' In The Key of Life," Arrington would show Gospel influence, having become an ordained minister. As the Nineties began, he left secular music behind until 2009 when Oakland's Dam-Funk brought him back into music. In 2020, Arrington put out a stellar SynthFunk/Soul, album "Down To The Lowest Terms: The Soul Sessions."
FIRE-TOOLZ - Eternal Home (The Instrumentals)
[CS](Hausu Mountains/Redeye)
Chicago's Angel Marcloid really knows how to mix up genres that are by definition NOT supposed to fit together. On this instrumental version of "Eternal Home," the screaming Death Metal-style vocals have been removed to focus on the dense, Eighties-production style patchwork of electronic drums, slippery Jazz guitar melody, ringing keys and synths, and her secret weapon - saxophone. What is unfurling here is a vision of Industrial music filtered through the industry of today. Time changes, chord flips, and general textural alterations happen with the frequency of what it would sound like to thumb through your phone from app-to-app. That is not to say there are not true moments of beauty here. Marcloid is an all-encompassing composer/collector of sound. "Odd Cat Sanctuary" and "Umbilical Cord Blood" are very Metal still, but the Top Gun-ish synth layered on top guides it along so well. The chord changes are cathartic. "Yearning = Alchemical Fire" is like magic video game music brought to life with the same underpinning thrust you find in Emo. Recorded at home over most of 2020 with Marcloid on 98% of the instrumental/synth/glitch creation, "Eternal Home" is that rare case where you put enough artificial sounds together and they become real.
