Some shows don’t perform just for living, breathing audiences. The actors proffer their words to history and the future, ancestors and descendants. Higher powers are watching.
In TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s “Gem of the Ocean,” the fate of the nation is onstage: whether it can heal, at last, from its wounds of bringing slaves to its shores and then going to civil war.
In one of the finest Bay Area theater productions in recent memory, the stakes begin at human scale. It’s 1904, and Citizen Barlow (Edward Ewell) seeks the help of Aunt Ester (Greta Oglesby) in reckoning with a crime he’s committed. Black Mary (Porscha Shaw) is trying to break away from the iron grip of her brother, Caesar (Rodney Hicks), come into her own as a spiritual leader under Aunt Ester’s guidance and maybe, just maybe, let a romance bud with Citizen — but only on the honest, mature terms of someone who’s already known and lost love. And Solly Two Kings (Kim Sullivan) and Eli (Jerome Preston Bates) bristle under the way Caesar runs his mill and the police force as if he’s, well, Caesar, and Solly has to help save his sister down in Alabama from Jim Crow.
But the show, which I saw Tuesday, April 12, at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, mines from this small, exquisitely wrought slice of Black life a sweeping vision of who we were, are and might yet still be as a country.
Such is the power of August Wilson’s script, part of his towering Century Cycle whereby he wrote one play for each decade of the 20th century, most of them, like “Gem,” set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, the Black neighborhood where Wilson was from.
His words are prophetic, ringing just as true today as in 1904. “We still settling it,” Solly Two Kings says of the Civil War. Rutherford Selig (Dan Hiatt) recounts overhearing a fellow white man say he wants to reinstitute slavery. ” ‘Would you fight another war?’ And he said, ‘Hell yeah.’ ”
As for freedom, which many of the play’s characters weren’t born with, winning it was only the beginning, says Solly. “You got to fight to make it mean something. All it mean is you got a long row to hoe and ain’t got no plow.”
New Artistic Director Tim Bond, making his TheatreWorks directing debut, casts the kind of spell onstage where you, bewitched in the audience, would grab hold of the actors’ hands and accompany them anywhere, not least aboard the mystical slave ship upon which Citizen Barlow embarks under Aunt Ester’s aegis. Such sorcery comes from trust and faith in cast and audience. It comes from an understanding of and compassion for the text so deep the company relaxes into it and lets it breathe.
Go and bear witness to world-class performers at the height of their powers. Watch as Hicks carries Caesar as if his chest is connected directly to the ceiling, as if he’s the prow of a battleship slicing through thick, unyielding water, spewing hate and self-importance and bootstraps mythology nonsense like a spigot with no off handle. Marvel as Bates, in a smaller role, makes opening the door to visitors into an event or buries his fists in his pockets as the only way he can keep from erupting in rage. Relish the way Sullivan as Solly wields his voice as rapier.
When Oglesby or Shaw sings, even in brief, interstitial moments, wonder for an instant if the sound is piping in from the great beyond. When Black Mary sees right through Citizen Barlow, earnestly wondering how much man there is behind his lovemaking, Shaw makes clear that her piercing gaze comes from self-knowledge born of profound loss.
And then there’s Oglesby, whose mere essence and epoch-plumbing voice can stop a man in his tracks where brute force comes short, who can carry the neighborhood and the mythology that undergirds it on her shoulders. In a dress hemmed with tinkling shells and other trinkets (Lydia Tanji did the miraculous costume design), she can soar in a preacher’s cadence and thrust and parry in a coquette’s repartee. She reveals spiritual might as both Olympic sport and cognitive feat.
The works of Wilson, who died in 2005, are modern-day classics, yes. But this production shows what that term means. “Gem” is written with the fire of a manifesto, the lightning of Scripture. There’s nothing safe and settled in Wilson’s corner of the bookshelf, which means there’s nothing safe and settled in the nation that houses it.
N“Gem of the Ocean”: Written by August Wilson. Directed by Tim Bond. Through May 1. Two hours, 45 minutes. $30-$100, subject to change. Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View. 877-662-8978. www.theatreworks.org