Playwright Keith Josef Adkins' work may be experimental, but his intentions are clear.
"Fun, other-worldliness, slightly over-the-top, lots of energy, satire even," plead his author's notes. "But please, please do NOT create any heavy weightiness...This is not kitchen-sink or melodrama."
Anyone who wanders into Cleveland Public Theatre this Friday expecting mainstream drama will notice the difference in a New York minute. Adkins' "On the Hills of Black America", an evening of seven thematically-linked short plays -- is a trip to a phantasmagoric universe next door, where young men receive apocalyptic messages from distant comets and a newborn poetry-rapping crack baby threatens the audience with a water Uzi.
"This was my breakthrough play, the one where I stopped censoring myself and just let everything pour through me," admits Adkins with a smile.
Full of surreal images and transgressive humor, it's a far cry from his first play "Plum Wine Dreaming", the realistic drama that got him admitted to the prestigious Iowa Playwrights Workshop.
"That one was my "Raisin in the Sun" ripoff," he laughs.
Adkins, now a New York City resident, has commissions pending from both the New York Theatre Workshop and the Joseph Papp Public Theatre since "Hills" won him Cleveland Public Theatre's Katherine and Lee Chilcote Award for Best New Play last year. This production is part of the award.
Just hours before the first "Hills" preview, Adkins is having a freewheeling conversation over lunch about his personal history, influences, and the serpentine path he's traveled since his Cincinnati boyhood. With a gentle voice and an easy smile, Adkins is a charmer: handsome enough to be the on-camera broadcast journalist he trained to be at Wright State University. But just before graduation he'd begun moving toward theatre, talking his way into the freshman acting program.
"Luckily I discovered early on that I was better off in creative writing than in journalism," he says. "I was more interested in the story behind the story, in imagining the 'What if?'"
After graduation, Adkins worked for a while in New York as an actor. Then, enchanted by Alice Walker's paean to the diversity and beauty of the San Francisco Bay Area, he moved west. He immersed himself in the black arts scene there, and became a well-regarded performance poet with a fiery style and an attitude to match.
"Black nationalism gave my rage a voice. Oh, I could really get people pumped," he recalls. "And then, over time, I started to question things -- about the rhetoric, the repetition. I began to notice that certain voices were excluded in that version of community."
Some of it, Adkins realized, had to do with gender politics.
"It was fine if a woman wrote about motherhood -- but not if she was an independent thinker", says Adkins, whose own mother was a strong-minded woman who packed cookies for Keebler and was the budding writer's biggest fan. And then there was the homophobia -- from Eldridge Cleaver's rejection of James Baldwin to the ostracism of men who didn't project a traditionally masculine persona.
Adkins began to look at his own past, to his own feelings of alienation and difference dating back to his childhood.
"I had never fit in -- a kind of weird kid who took plants from the garden, who got teased for looking like a girl," he said.
All the short pieces in "On the Hills of Black America" are informed by Adkins' questioning of black iconography and mythology. The images are bizarrely vivid, funny and nightmarish. In "Carnival Coming", mother Mary-Mary and her son O'Jimmy shuck and jive as they hunger for The Illusion As Mythical Black Father -- represented on stage by an Afrocentric crown/hat that is too huge for any head to fill. In the title play, father Lil' Amos keeps trying to kill his son Andy, who lugs around sacks of body parts and hears transmissions from "great BlueBlack ancestors from beyond Pluto".
When it's suggested to Adkins that his visions are, well, a little spooky and apocalyptic for some people to consider "fun", he laughs again. "My family used to love horror movies. We watched them incessantly."
Then he tells about his personal apocalypse in 1983, the year his born-again relatives became convinced that Jesus was coming and the world was imminently ending.
"I was a teenager and I kept saying, 'Oh God, not yet! I haven't done anything yet!' And they'd all go, 'Blasphemer!'", he recalls with a laugh.
Adkins still gets that reaction from some quarters, says director Tony Sias.
"I had several seasoned actors who dropped out; they just couldn't make themselves go where Keith and I wanted," says Sias. "So to cast the show, I ended up hanging out in poets' cafes, finding young artists who were willing to take the risks. And I'm really happy with the raw talent we've found."
Several of the actors are performance poets themselves -- including Ebani Edwards, whose performance was recently featured in the documentary film "Slam".
"It helps," says Sias. "They're finding the music and the rhythm in Keith's language."
[Cleveland Public Theatre presents "On the Hills of Black America". Feb. 19-March 6 at 8 p.m., 6415 Detroit Ave., Cleveland. Call 631-2727 for reservations and tickets.]
Originally published in the Plain Dealer, February 1999.
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