New theater builds on tradition
the remix fuses colored girls and black boys
By: Shannon Gibney
Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder
Originally posted 6/11/2003
“I feel like I’m on the verge of something, but I just can’t get it out. I can’t figure out why we as a people are so fragmented and separate still,” says Tierra King, 22-year-old artistic director and co-founder of Soulistic Playhouse (SP).
King will have the chance to express these concerns in SP’s first production, the remix— a combination of Ntozake Shange’s breakthrough play for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf and Keith Antar Mason’s work inspired by colored girls: for black boys who have considered homicide when the streets were too much. the remix opens Friday, June 13, and runs through Saturday, June 21, at the Sabathani Community Center.
“The people who came before us, they built the bridge and we’re trying to get there. The only thing is, my generation, we’re not really sure where ‘there’ is. We were told go to go to college, to get an education, but we don’t really know what to do with it all,” King continues. She says that by combining the two plays — which both deal with the themes of racism, sexism, violence, and self-love — SP hopes to help audiences understand how these same issues resonate in young people’s lives today.
“I saw colored girls in ’73 and ’74 at McCormick Place in Chicago,” says actress Xavia Bohanam, a social worker, licensed nurse and mother of six. “It was just so amazing. I was like, ‘Whoa!’ and it was there for like 26 weeks. I saw my mother being one of these women that were expressing themselves with all these experiences. It was deep because I could relate that to understanding why my mother’s thinking was like it was. You know, how some of the things that had happened in her life had transpired. It gave me a better understanding and I started writing then.”
For Bohanam, the topics explored in colored girls are even more prevalent now than when the play first appeared in the ’70s. She says, “You know, after the Movement it still ain’t changed — it’s still the same things. You’re still struggling to survive. There’s just a different situation occurring now; the mental picture has changed, but the perpetrator has gotten more skilled. So maybe this play can give some understanding to the younger ones, so that they can see and understand that.”
e.g. bailey, director of the remix, believes that the key to expressing these contemporary concerns is revisiting and revitalizing each play’s history. “Shange wrote colored girls, which originally started out as seven poems, and kept expanding it and working with dancers and musicians. She had it on Broadway and it came to be what we know today. Keith Antar Mason’s play wasn’t so much a response to it, but he wrote it from a Black male perspective — dealing with the same issues. In a lot of ways the plays echo each other, and they’re almost, in some places, replicas of each other.”
For bailey, King, and SP co-founder Stephenetta Harmon, the challenge was to integrate the two plays so that they become something new in the process. “These are nonlinear narratives, which is a tradition in African American theater, African American work,” says bailey. “You look at jazz, you look at hip-hop — those are nonlinear forms in a lot of ways. And so it may not make literal sense, but it has to make spiritual sense.”
Making the play make spiritual sense, bailey contends, involves using the skills that SP actors already have in spoken word and hip-hop. Most actors in the production do not have theater experience; some are dancers and others are poets and writers. The majority of them were found at open mics. “That’s their world and that’s their aesthetic,” says bailey.
He adds, “I think it’s important that they have found this work at this time in their life, at this time in history, because they’ve come to this point and they were given this work and this tradition in order to move it forward.”
For more information on the remix, call 612-722-0586 or visitwww.soulisticplayhouse.org .