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Last Updated: Apr 28th, 2009 - 11:43:49 |
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| Dael Orlandersmith |
Soon, it will be warm enough to hang out on the stoop again. In Dael Orlandersmith’s “Stoop Stories,” the worn out steps of New York City’s neighborhoods are transformed, becoming gathering places where culture and history are colorfully transmitted.
In the world premiere of her one-woman set at the Studio Theater in Washington, D.C., Orlandersmith poetically weaves tales of stoop storytellers, who are also drug addicts, bookish young girls trying to escape the pull of the Harlem low life, Latino playboys and old Black men complaining about the changes they endure just to have a good time.
A warm night and a few beers make it easy for the stoop dwellers to spin their tales and carry you far away to where “you can see and smell the places, and then the stoop is no longer a stoop in Harlem…it’s now the Riviera.” The hangers-on get caught up in the up in the alcohol enhanced reverie and embellished memories of a man thinking out loud about “women in tight short skirts and high heels and red lipstick.” And then a rat runs by, bringing the folks back to Harlem.
On stage, sitting on the stoop, walking back and forth, sometimes dancing to salsa music, Orlandersmith seamlessly channels each of her street storytellers. There’s a protective urge that arises when her voice changes into a slightly higher pitched, plaintive yet direct cadence of an earnest teenage girl who loves going to the library. “I get upset when I find a book with one of the pages missing,” she says, in a voice that’s kind of sad about how everything in Harlem is kind of messed up. “When I grow up,” she says “I’m gonna have a house full of books.”
Orlandersmith, an acclaimed writer and actress whose play “Yellowman” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, disappears into her characters and draws you to them. One of her more compelling storytellers is a Polish man named Herman who ran a newsstand in Harlem in the 1940s, back when “Black people were cultured…very nice.” He talks about how he met Langston Hughes, jazz greats Roy Eldridge and Ella Fitzgerald. One day he runs into Billie Holiday at a bar where she was performing. “She was beautiful when I first met her but now her arms were skinny… and all the needle marks.” Herman remembers flirting with Lady Day and then criticizing her drug habit. They find a common bond in their violent memories of racism. When it came time to do her set, Herman remembers, “Billie said `Herman, I’m gonna do this one just for you’.” The song, says Herman, was “Strange Fruit.”
And, of course, Orlandersmith does a dead-on Billie Holiday. She respects her people, and while some of them have challenges, she instills depth and an understated power into each Harlem denizen she brings to the stage. They’re memorable characters you would like to sit on a stoop with, share a beer, and listen to while they share a bit of their lives.
Stoop Stories has been extended at The Studio Theater’s Metheny Theatre, 1501 14th Street NW, Washington D.C. 202-332-3300.
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