Since Africa
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Gehringer, Miller, Carpenter (back)
Photo by Craig Schwartz
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By January Riddle
There is a saying in some African regions that once you have experienced any part of this huge, diverse continent, “Africa is in your skin.” It’s not a reference to skin color, but about how Africa calls to those who have spent real time there, how it makes you remember its details as if they have been embossed on your epidermis.
Such permanent personal detail manifests as a significant, sometimes primal theme of identity in Since Africa, Mia McCullough’s tough, soul-searching drama playing at The Old Globe’s arena stage. Sensitively directed by Seema Sueko and courageously acted by a skilled and forceful cast, this production gets at what it means to be African, American, African-American, native, immigrant, benefactor and refugee.
With an honesty that is sometimes brutal, at others amusing, it explores some of the myriad ways one’s own identities and the search for them can force unwitting focus on those of others, causing tension, disputes, and battles.
This is a play about belonging and not belonging, about loss and grief, and, finally, hope. Skin and its adornment becomes a metaphor signifying community and culture and the rituals that join people together. Sometimes, but not always, rituals include the scarring and tattooing of one’s skin; and the result confirms belonging.
But, in this tightly written, complex drama, it is not all that simple. Each of the characters is wounded, grieving, scarred, not necessarily visibly so. And each is seeking refuge, peace, a sense of recovery from losses that range from horrific and recent to subtle and long-term.
The most disastrous injury would seem to belong to Ater Dahl (Warner Miller), one of the lost boys of Sudan, who saw his entire Dinka village and most of his family eradicated by Arab traders in his home country. Now a refugee from his homeland and the camp where he grew up, he struggles to adapt to America, the Promise Land of his fantasies. Sensitively portraying just the right blend of innocence, wisdom, and humor, Miller keeps Ater from becoming a pen-and-ink rendering of a tragic figure and brings him to full dimension.
Playing Florence Nightingale to Ater is Diane MacIntyre (Linda Gehringer), a recently widowed socialite who has volunteered to tutor him in the ways of his new world. Her husband died in Africa, on their safari vacation, so making Ater her own private cause seems a natural gesture and promises her the grief therapy that her shrink cannot seem to deliver.
This is Diane’s story as much as it is Ater’s. Diane is a formidable, yet well-meaning woman, clear in her liberal views, used to being in charge and having her own way. Yet she is vulnerable, sad, and adrift. Fortunately, Gehringer is more than up to the challenge of creating and translating her complexity, and the play moves at the right pace, thanks to her expert communication.
Diane’s daughter, Eve MacIntyre, provides the biting sarcasm and didactic idealism of college-aged youth, lashing out at the mother who just doesn’t understand as she struggles to deal with her father’s sudden death. Ashley Clements is a wonderful Eve, bringing a forthrightness and up-front attitude to her character that offers the most poignant and witty piercings of dialogue. She makes a totally believable young woman struggling between the urge to grow up and the longing for childhood’s retreat.
Grappling with his lack of clear identity, his psychological bruises cloaked in a cleric’s robes, Reggie Hudson (Willie C. Carpenter) tries to claim the African identity struggles for his own people, resenting Diane’s interference in fostering his parishioner, Ater, even though it was he who recruited her. Carpenter brings his proficient timing and subtle control to this difficult role, keeping this cleric from becoming pathetic or puritanical.
Nick Fouch’s sparce and serviceable scenic design accommodates without interfering. Charlotte Devaux’s suitable costumes, Paul Peterson’s eerie but interesting sound design (which includes the drumbeats that substitute for the psychologist’s words) and Jason Bieber’s clear lighting design all give rise to the believability of the entire production. That is not without its challenges, either, considering the trickster figure that showcases the ritual and motion of African cultures.
In an ingeniously choreographed echo of the Greek chorus concept, The Nameless One (a mesmerizing Kristin D. Carpenter) leaps and twirls throughout, as she taunts and teases, beckons and soothes, wordlessly punctuating the action and the discussion.
This wonderful conceit, coupled with the many moments of comedy, keep this very verbal play from becoming a sermon. For humor, take the antiquated can opener donated for Ater’s sparse kitchen that is unfamiliar even to Diane. Or the door buzzer that none of the characters can seem to master. Or Ater spending his first paycheck as a hotel laundry worker on saggy gangsta togs and showing them off with the exaggerated saunter of a cartoonish banger.
Four-dimensional and fully formed, this is a well-crafted play, wrought by an author who knows how to probe beneath the obvious. It is also an expertly delivered play, wrangled and woven by a dedicated cast. It can easily get in your skin.
*****
“Since Africa” by Mia McCullough plays at The Old Globe Theatre’s arena stage at the San Diego Museum of Art’s James S. Copley Auditorium through March 8.
Performances are: Sun/Tue/Wed at 7pm; Thu/Fri/Sat at 8pm; Matinees Sat & Sun at 2pm.
Tickets are $29-$59.
Call 619-23-GLOBE or visit www.TheOldGlobe.org
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