A young man in his early 20s, Chadwick Boseman is a Howard University-educated actor and director, but—based on the latest production from TSU’s Summer Stock Theatre—his star would really appear to be on the ascent as a playwright. Boseman’s Hieroglyphic Graffiti debuted last year at the National Black Theatre Festival in North Carolina. It was then performed earlier this year at the 2002 New York Hip-Hop Theatre Festival. Now it receives its first regional staging in an often stirring production under the direction of Barry Scott.
Set in a bookstore in our nation’s capital’s black community, Hieroglyphic Graffiti is a fairly conventionally structured play. Proprietors Seth and Isis are brother and sister; they run their business with the assistance of a charming but somewhat wayward high-schooler, Horus. Neighboring restaurant owner Teasley stops in to complain about the problem of graffiti that plagues the local merchants, and about the ravings of an omnipresent homeless man named Hobart.
This fairly straightforward setup is followed by an exploration of epic human issues, based partially on the mythical tale of the Egyptian deities Isis and Osiris. We soon learn that bookstore owner Isis was recently widowed when her husband, Osi, was inexplicably gunned down in the store. The unsolved nature of the murder provides intrigue, which is spiked even more when it is revealed that Osi had been Seth and Isis’s adopted brother. Meanwhile, hieroglyphic writing has appeared without explanation both on the outside walls of the White House and inside the bookstore, and Hobart wanders the nearby alley and cemetery ranting like a possessed preacher-man, his ominous speechifying functioning not unlike a Greek chorus.
There is raw power in Boseman’s writing, which is characterized by realistic dialogue and a definite flair for the dramatic moment, of which there are many. Scott’s direction has something to do with this as well, particularly in his choice of selected musical fragments to underscore key points in the action. This adds a conscious cinematic feel to the play’s movement, the cumulative multimedia sensibility being quite striking in effect.
The cast, drawn from local auditions, offers a mix of youth and experience, and Scott wrings out the best from both. TSU students Renard Hirsch and Mia Bankston, as Seth and Isis, are unspectacular yet competent. Even better as Horus is Alabama A&M senior Rashad Rayford, who demonstrates a natural affinity for the stage. Robert A. Pritchard makes effective ghostlike apparitions as Osi, and Kenneth Dozier offers a marvelously vivid performance as Teasley, but Patrick Christian all but steals the show as Hobart, a role that binds together the drama’s passion, its mythic and biblical imagery, and its ambitious proportions.
In presenting this fine production of a play by such a gifted new author, both Scott and his assistant director, Kimberley LaMarque, continue to move forward in their theatrical activities, carving out new territory for the TSU program and for Nashville theater in general.
The hills are alive
The Sound of Music opened at Chaffin’s Barn Dinner Theatre last week. The Rodgers and Hammerstein classic concerning Austria’s Family von Trapp is more than 40 years old, but it still holds up well. Composer Richard Rodgers’ musical motifs are as tuneful as ever—even if the popular Julie Andrews movie version almost killed them with overexposure.
More interesting this time around is the infernal genius of author/lyricist Oscar Hammerstein, who always received criticism as a sentimental old fool with this, his final work. But though Hammerstein offers us his fair share of cornball setups, he more often than not knocks ’em down with witty dialogue and funny one-liners. And if you think that Stephen Sondheim at some point wrested the crown of lyrical cleverness away from Oscar (who was his mentor), one need only hear the late master at his best, rhyming “derring-do” with “herring do.”
There’s a lot good going on in the Barn’s production: cute kiddies, funny singing nuns, an admirable one-man-band performance by keyboardist Laura Rosser, and a game effort by Martha Wilkinson in the role of Maria, the young postulant who exits the nunnery and finds love and family in one fell swoop. It’s a long night, though, and for every giddy moment there’s at least another when the limitations of dinner-theater culture rules. Everyone gives it their all, and the devoted Chaffin’s audience is there in force to root them on. Results are mixed, however, and if you arrive at 6 to start eating, you don’t exit until 11. Devoted Sound of Music fans will reap some benefits from this production; less enthusiastic observers will have their attention spans taxed beyond reasonable limits. The show runs through Sept. 7.
