Dawn L. Troupe, Benoit Monin (from “Healing”). All photos by Carson French.

One can only imagine how many treasure troves of artistry lie hidden away around the world in dusty attics and musty cellars.  Nina Collins, daughter of playwright and poet Kathleen Collins, has collected and released a rich reserve of her late mother’s previously unpublished works from the 1970s and 1980s.  Included are four short plays that, while they are uneven, and despite their age, resonate today.

Like Kathleen Collins’s predecessor and inspiration, Zora Neale Hurston, who is referenced in “Begin the Beguine,” Collins’s work was largely unrecognized in her lifetime.  Two films she wrote and produced were seen only on the festival circuit, with no commercial distribution.  However, in the last several years, her “Losing Ground” from 1982 was released in various home electronics formats.  In 2020, the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress designated the movie for preservation as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Participating in a joint world premiere with Performance Space New York, Oakland Theater Project presents the quartet live, viewed by the audience in these pandemic times from their vehicles and heard through FM radio feed.  Vehicles are parked only one-deep on three sides of the performance ground, so that the audience has unobstructed views as if from mid-orchestra around an outdoor thrust stage.

Michael Socrates Moran and Dawn L. Troupe co-direct, and the latter plays the lead role in each play.  Ms Troupe’s passion for the project is evident in her commanding performances.  Her four characters are not defined as comprising one identity, yet, a complex, archetypical profile derives from the aggregate.  She must convey a wide range of emotions from reverent to hostile to sassy.  She is aloof, alluring, and uncertain in defining a composite personality.

Leon Jones (from “Begin the Beguine”), Margherita Ventura (from “The Reading”).

It is not disclosed whether the plays were intended as a set, but together, they possess a symmetry in which the whole exceeds the sum of the parts.  Taken as one, they plumb the psyche of a black woman, or a group of black women, if the viewer rejects the notion of four phases of a single character.  The opening play is a soliloquy, while each of the remaining three have two significant players.  But in each, the two characters are variously distinguished by contrasts in race, gender, and/or age.  A professional or artistic black woman is central to each.

“Reflection,” the most universal and existential of the plays, confronts us at the outset.  The black woman could be any ethnicity or gender as she confronts daily life and tries to find God.  As a dancer and a housewife with daily chores to complete, she tries to reconcile the different lives she leads, wondering which one is real.  The main concept in this play is of timeless interest, but consistent with the problem itself, the play offers no conclusion.  This thread runs through the one-acts and may be unsatisfying for those looking for closure from stories.

Most animated, conflictual, and interesting is “The Reading.”  Two women, one black and one white, await appointments with a psychic.  The sociable and uninhibited white woman probes and expounds and begins to reveal stereotypical racial thoughts, while the black woman parries and condescends.  Yet in the end, she, too, lets down her guard and shares her own inner thoughts.  When the women learn that the psychic will have time for only one reading, which woman will it be, and why?

Most opaque is the eponymous third play, “Begin the Beguine.”  A middle-aged actress engages with a younger man in a park.  At first, it seems that he is her son, but the relationship becomes increasingly ambiguous to the point that he becomes every man.  Her inclination to perform on and off stage is evident in her storytelling, but what does this say about her being?  Is she trapped on a treadmill, or is she released?

In the final episode, “The Healing,” the black woman receives laying-on-of-hands treatment from a white therapist.  Their fractious session evidences the divide between his offer of faith healing, a solution without reference to cause, versus her organic need to understand why it is that she hurts.  Along the way, racial tension is heightened as she willfully breaks a rule of propriety and he participates in a naive act that may be perceived as a precursor to what we now consider appropriation.

Kimberly Daniels (from”The Reading”), Dawn L. Troupe.

Kudos to OTP for devising ways to bring live theater to its audience.  The staging of these four one-acts is simple, accented by attractive decorative lighting.  The acting, mostly by company members, suits the material.  Nonetheless, the plays would benefit from production in a more traditional environment.  As a corollary to our time, observing a play from a car is a bit muffled, like breathing through a surgical mask, yet it certainly serves it purpose.

Through the series of incidents, we do gain understanding, as well as empathy, for this multidimensional woman.  Each play possesses its own internal motivation and noteworthy development, but typical of such compilations, it lacks connection to provide a true dramatic arc.  Minor adaptations to the texts could help facilitate connectiveness.  Nonetheless, these works represent a notable artifact from an underappreciated author, and an interesting viewing for those drawn to this type of material.

“Begin the Beguine: A Quartet of One-Acts,” a world premiere of plays written by Kathleen Collins is produced by Oakland Theater Project and plays live in drive-in format at FLAX art & design, 1501 Martin Luther King Way, Oakland, CA through July 3, 2021 and streams online June 19-July 3, 2021.

Victor Cordell, Ph.D.
American Theatre Critics Association
San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

Lisa Ramirez. Photo by Carson French.

“April is the cruelest month…..”  This famous line opens T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” generally regarded as one of the finest pieces of modern literature.  At its best, this 434-line epic poem oozes symbolism and begs never-ending analysis of its trenchant insights.  Yet, like its opening line, “The Waste Land” contains endless contradictions and ambiguities.  Indeed, Eliot provided lengthy annotations of the poem in its original publication, though some of those confuse rather than illuminate.  Detractors would submit that his episodic narrative with leaps in time, and changes in speakers and narrative style lacks cohesion.  But perhaps that reflected the way he saw the new world around him.  Further, Eliot’s frequent allusions to other literary works and use of untranslated foreign languages may seem to impress rather than inform.

John Wilkens has adapted “The Waste Land” to the stage as a vehicle for a solo performer.  Oakland Theater Project has produced the staging, starring the multi-talented Lisa Ramirez and directed by Michael Socrates Moran.  This production is the first live performance with a live audience sanctioned by Actors Equity in the state of California since the start of the pandemic.  But to accomplish the approval, the performance is outdoors, and the audience remain in their cars.  The good news with this arrangement is that the cars are parked one-deep, so that sight lines are great and the audience is close to the performer.  The audio comes through FM on the car radio.  The bad news, for the company, is that audience size is seriously limited.

Because the poem tells stories in different voices and perspectives, it is conducive to dramatic staging.  For those who wish to expand their intellectual horizons but can’t muster the motivation to read Eliot’s masterpiece, Ramirez’s recitation with interpretive movement, variation of voicing, affect, and intensity captures the viewer’s attention in a manner that few readers would self-engender.  And the performance offers a fine dose of high-brow culture in well less than an hour.  As a fine actor, she does emote effectively, although her voice is not long on the gravitas often associated with poetry reading.

This production offers the added dimension of projected images to enhance the lyrics and acting.  A video preface to the live performance of brief clips covers the history from when the poem was written to current day – a reminiscence of iconic snippets embracing everything from pop culture to war.  In the absence of a printed program, I am unable to credit the creator.  Few props appear on the earthen parking-lot “stage.”  One used to pleasant effect is a strummed mandolin, which accompanies Ramirez as she delivers the words of the blind, Greek prophet, Tiresias, in a manner like an opera recitative.

The poet doesn’t refer explicitly to a waste land, so what is the poem about?  The dominant received wisdom is that it concerns loss.  Published in 1922, American-born Eliot had lived for a decade in England, which had just suffered through World War I, and concurrently, the (inappropriately named!) Spanish Flu epidemic.  Sensing that the massive loss of life and destruction of property had permanently displaced pre-war society, Eliot foresaw a bleak future.  The poem is written in five distinct sections.  The first, “The Burial of the Dead” establishes the overriding motif, and the speaker, Marie, evidences loss of station and things when she leaves childhood behind.  The most direct reference to the uncertainty ahead appears in the final section, “What the Thunder Said,” with an expressed reference to the nursery rhyme “London Bridge is Falling Down” providing the analogy to failed civilization.

“The Waste Land” particularly resonates as a corollary to our time.   The impact of Covid-19 in the United States now approaches that of the Spanish Flu, though worldwide, the latter was 15 times more deadly than Covid-19 has been to date.  And while a devastating military war loomed in Eliot’s consciousness, this country now faces a cultural war that increasingly cleaves us into two disparate camps with little common ground between us, and in which, tragically, a large segment of the population representing one of those camps even refuses to accept empirical facts that disconfirm what they wish to believe.

“The Waste Land” is written by T. S. Eliot, adapted by John Wilkens, and produced by Oakland Theater Project.  It plays in live performance drive-in theater format at the company’s home, Flax art + design, 1501 Martin Luther King, Jr. Parkway, Oakland, CA through May 16, 2021.