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Want to catch a glimpse of theatre for the 21st century? Then zoom over to Cleveland Public Theatre for Keith Josef Adkins' Chilcote Award-winning "On The Hills of Black America", and prepare for an exhilarating ride.
A intermissionless 90 minutes of enigmatic vignettes and blistering bravura monologues, "...Hills" blazes like the comet of its title one-act over a landscape of bizarre mythic characters, shedding a strange glow on what is revealed. Playwright Adkins has a genuine and original talent. With a poet's ear and a sly, sci-fi sensibility, his work sparks with ferocious intelligence, wit, and indelible images. And director Tony Sias does the work proud, setting an dynamic pace and conjuring miracles from his young cast.
One of the biggest marvels is how effortlessly this ensemble of dancers and performance poets seems to boogie through Adkins' dense, manic hiphop-meets-Samuel-Beckett scat language. It's a sensual listening experience, like bopping to the riffs and rhythms of a hot jazz combo, and the capacity opening night crowd was vocal and responsive throughout. But the language is only one part: each vignette is also highly theatrical, with a heightened metaphoric quality much like a vivid series of dreams. They're funny, yet charged with mythic power.
As Geronimo Garvey -- a crack baby with attitude, mysteriously grown to manhood overnight -- Jonathan D. Wray crackles with an intense warrior energy, strutting in his diaper, wielding a water Uzi and threatening to "scare the dookie up outta ya". "The Legend of Johnny Trust" is an eerie, erotically-charged pas de deux between whisper-thin Travela (Ebani Edwards) and hulking Johnny (a magnetic Sherman Williams). Spinning each other around on a footpath where girls have been found murdered, Edwards chants jump-rope rhymes while Williams, shaved head and muscles gleaming, looks like he could snap her in two with one hand.
Edwards has a radiant, centered presence that commands attention in all of her roles. (How can she look so regal covered in balloons in "Carnival Coming"?) And she and Talib McCullough are very funny as wary parents Cree and Lil' Amos in the title play -- humoring their cheerily prophetic son Andy (Kevin Moore) by chanting and holding up spatulas and wire whisks in order to beam their thoughts to space aliens.
Small and delicate, Moore is also riveting as ghostly Sadie, the androgynous "object of feminine qualities" in a scarlet bustier and curls who watches as two brothers fight over her/his buried body in "Digging Up Sadie". Dreadlocks trembling, McCullough has a surprisingly touching conversation about relationships with a tittering refrigerator in "For Brothas Who Wives Claim to Be Aliens".
Princette Bowling is terrific as the furious G'Na in "G'Na Monticello Speaks on Historical Landmarks" -- a dark-skinned descendent of Thomas Jefferson who is sick of playing slave/mistress Sally Heming's personal servant in a theme-park reenactment. And she's both sexy and funny as the youth-obsessed mother in "Carnival Coming", shimmying in her tight black dress like Tina Turner, opposite Allen Branstein's ominous turn as a smarmy white carnival barker in a smashed top hat.
The production design is smartly spare. Daniel C. Allen's costumes are just right; Giuseppe Provenanzo's set, with floating steps and chalky haunted house facade, is effective and simple; and both Jordan Davis' sound and Marcus Dana's lights are evocative.
Adkins' vision is ultimately transformating and compassionate. His obsessed characters spew and signify like charismatic street preachers, urging us toward authenticity. Even in the shadow of apocalypse, he hints, we the legacy of "six generations of deformities" can still grasp for a future with more truth, less pain. "Reinvent. Reconstruct. Recreate.", intones The Illusion as Mythical Black Father in the play's benediction. "Somewhere in there you can find yourselves."
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