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It's rare that you can get an audience to really listen -- especially to one actor holding the stage alone for 90 minutes, and even more rarely when the audience is a mix of adults and teens. But when dramatic stories are well-told and worth telling, they are magical empathy generators. They can make us care about one person's life, transforming the personal into the universal, and telling us something about our common experience as humans.
That's a tall order, but Charlayne Woodard's award-winning "Pretty Fire", now playing at Case Western Reserve University's Eldred Theatre, does a darn good job of filling it. In this5-part memoir about her African-American girlhood in Albany, NY and summers in Georgia, playwright Woodard manages to hit all the bases -- dramatic, comic, sentimental, tart, spooky, and nostalgic -- with an engaging narrator and an armload of colorful characters. It's a marvelous show for families and teens -- a truthful, complex look at childhood, one that doesn't pull its punches but nevertheless has a positive message.
Actor/producer Rasheryl McCreary, a returning Case Western Reserve student with many professional credits, and director Catherine Albers together do a solid job with Woodard's material, making the stories elegantly simple and accessible.
There are 5 sections to "Pretty Fire", and they get progressively richer as the show continues -- partly because they become more acted and less told, partly because the stories themselves get more complex and better written. The opening, "Birth", has some witty moments, but it's nearly all narration -- about Woodard's unusual and difficult birth (she was a one-and-a-half pound preemie, who fell into her mother's outstretched hand). The second story, about Woodard's early school days, begins comic (about learning her ABC's) and then takes a sharp turn, when she is first taunted by a racial epithet during a sprint. You can see the painful surprise of it double her over like she was gut-punched.
McCreary and the show both hit their stride during the title piece, "Pretty Fire", and never let up. In it, McCreary conjures up all the glorious paradoxes of childhood summers with grandparents in the Jim Crow South. Nostalgic memories of an all-black neighborhood full of sensual delights -- from squishy red Georgia clay to the cries of seafood peddlers -- mix with the mute terror of a Ku Klux Klan cross burning.
"Bonesy" tells of a girl's ugly secret, an encounter in the rain with a threatening neighbor boy -- it is spare, unsentimental, and dead-on.
The final piece, "Joy", is well-named: it's rich, comic, and a genuinely touching crowd-pleaser, and in it McCreary also gets to show off her lovely voice. It's the tale of a beloved sanctified Grandma's "dying wish" for her grandchildren to glorify God in the Junior Church Choir, and the hoopla it entails. McCreary shows us the whole church, through one quicksilver impression after another -- the squirming kids, the churchwoman droning the church supper menu, her own awe-struck solo, and her grandmother, struck with the Spirit, twirling around her cane. It's a deliciously satisfying final image.
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