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To a capacity crowd in its Downstage space, Cleveland Public Theatre opened its new season with "To Be or Not to Be in the 90's", a solo show by area performance poet Mary E. Weems. Billed as a dramalogue, the evening interweaves some of Weems' best-known poems with a quintet of confessional monologues.
The territory Weems covers is harshly urban, a ghetto landscape that leaves marks on young women's bodies and souls, whose "bruised-sparrow arms cuss the wind". It's a landscape mined with violence in many forms, a heart's load of pain that barrels through generations, claiming victims and leaving wary, scarred survivors.
In "Jacks", a girl's childhood game is played to the sing-song of racial slurs. Internalized racism goes so deep that a dark-skinned child cannot escape painful teasing, even when "color's scattered through (her) family like jacks."
"Baptized" explores a girl's friendship with a white schoolmate and her family. From a delighted curiosity at family sit-down dinners where grownups intone "please pass the salt" instead of eating alone off TV trays, the memory builds to the moment at a backyard pool party where racism is like a plunge into ice-cold water.
In one of the evening's strongest pieces, "Cheering for the Dead", a young girl who should be a cheerleader instead has an macabre obsession: memorializing a dead boy through the insistent graffiti "R.I.P. MARK". Michelle Weems, the poet's daughter, is fiercely effective as the bike-riding memorialist, confronted by an angry woman who sees the ubiquitous marks as nothing but annoying trash in a neighborhood where grief is omnipresent. "Who was Mark anyway?", the woman complains, that this child should be "tattooin' these buildin's like the mark is permanent, like anybody who didn't know him missed somethin'."
The act one finale "Woman in the Tree" is an unflinching portrait of a woman's attraction to and eventual escape from an abusive, alcoholic husband. In a surreal green veil, Weems recalls the moment of clarity when she "turned green and the scars from where he used to bite me disappeared". Less successful is the closing monologue "Father's Day", a collection of a daughter's unsent letters which indicts an absent father. Simple and sentimental, it lacks the clarity and compression of images and metaphor that characterizes Weems' best work.
The overwhelming strength of the evening is in the writing itself. The performance and Calvin McClinton's staging were more problematic. When performing as a poet on a bare stage, Weems has always had a focused, passionate energy that connects directly with her audience. Here, moving from chair to mirror to window, encumbered with costume changes, her words punctuated by music cues, her powerful persona sometimes seemed oddly muted. Some of it is the difficult transition from the poet's confident voice to the acting challenge of embodying discrete characters; at times Weems seemed caught somewhere in-between her poetic cadences and the discoveries of the theatrical moment, making transitions rough.
But even more, the staging literalizes images that are at their heart transcendently metaphoric. My sense is that in "To Be or Not to Be in the 90's" Weems isn't attempting to perform personal autobiography or "a survivor's story". Rather, she is using the intensity of language and image to open a doorway into women's experience of pain and illuminate a way out: "stirring my ashes/stopping to look back,/a poem." It's a journey that tugs at the conscience and the heart.
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