Displaying items by tag: Wardell Julius Clark

'The Magnolia Ballet' is an exceptional show—perfect in performances, direction (Mikael Burke), staging. And then there’s the script, by Terry Guest, who also plays the lead as Ezekiel “Z” Mitchell VI. While this show merits a Jeff Award (Chicago's Tony) without doubt, I believe it’s Pulitzer material, at least in my book. Why?

On the surface, 'The Magnolia Ballet' may seem an unassuming tale of a young black boy, Z, and his gradual coming out as gay in an unwelcoming rural South. Bright and sensitive, Z longs for affection denied by a stern and authoritarian father Ezekiel Mitchell V (Wardell Julius Clark). After his mother dies, Z takes solace in a grammar school friend, Danny Mitchell (Ben Sulzberger), a white boy. Best buddies, they do homework and listen to music together, and develop a tacit sexual relationship after puberty. And they probe whether they may have found that unicorn sought so sorely by white people, a post-racial friendship that jettisons five generations of slave and master dynamics.

All this in just 95 minutes (no intermission) that is humorous and adept. Terry Guest as Z is a remarkable actor, and we may have something on the order of 'Hedwig and the Angry Inch,' with author and performer in one. Sheldon D. Brown hovers over the action as Apparition, a ghost and stand-in for numerous men and women, black and white. His performance is a wonder, truly. Wardell Julius Clark is excellent as Z’s father, and periodically, Danny’s father, a white sheriff. Ben Sulzberger as Danny Mitchell nails the role.

Powerful and touching material for a sentimental memoir on its own, but the playwright takes it so much further, providing a sweeping context for examining how he as a gay Black man was formed. It includes the history of his father’s emotional constraints passed down over generations from the progenitor, a slave for whom expressing paternal love could be dangerous. We get a review of four centuries of white apologists for the “necessary evil” of slavery. We hear the specious argument from Z’s best friend about “remembering” the Confederate history but not embracing its roots in the economic defense of slave labor. A host of asides and details like the fact Z’s friend wears a Confederate jacket reproduced in 1910, provide clues to the overarching story: This jacket is not really an artifact saved from 1865, but evidence of the collective cultural consciousness that, replicating and propagating itself, perpetuates racism today.

Playwright Terry Guest gives us the white view of the world accurately, in a way we can understand. Z’s friend Danny laments his generational past: his ancestors helped perpetrate church burnings and the Selma bombing. They were at the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. Danny aspires to be released from his roots, and offers a sincere apology to Z for this baggage. And we get high points of cultural icons like “Gone With the Wind” and the threatening white sheriff seen through white and black eyes.

Guest is schooled in theater and a skillful playwright. Before this Chicago premiere 'The Magnolia Ballet' was staged at Indianapolis' Phoenix Theatre. Guest's other works include 'The Madness of Mary Todd Lincoln,' 'Andy Warhol Presents: The Cocaine Play,' and most recently 'At the Wake of the Dead Drag Queen.' This play is described as a "Southern Gothic fable that melds high drama, poetry. and spectacle to explore masculinity, racism, and the love between a queer kid and his father." 

The production incorporates balletic renderings of a barbershop haircut, evocative song, and Sheldon D. Brown's Apparition renders these and so many other poetic scenes that evidence his prolific background as a an actor from Shakespeare to contemporary works, and educator credits at Steppenwolf and Northlight. It is an underpinning of the play and production.

In the end, the white boy Danny meets a crossroads, forsaking Z in an incident triggered by homophobia, but powered by the centuries of separate and unequal power whites have over Blacks. The suggestion is that the racial divide is so ingrained it perpetuates itself. The playwright artfully gives white people an accessible view of the white world through Black eyes. We see this young Black man suffer for opening his heart to a white man. Guest paints a specific portrait of our racial split, and shows why it is so intractable. If that divide is ever to be bridged, it will be helped by great artists like Guest and the creative team of About Face Theatre. Highly recommended, it runs through June 11 at the Den Theater, 1331 N. Milwaukee Ave. in Chicago.

Some of us are born with a passion, a passion for music or art or math. In the case of First Folio’s Silent Sky, one woman gives up almost everything in her personal life because she senses furiously, in her heart, that HER passion is going to lead to a discovery that will help all of humankind. This special woman, Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868–1921), turns out be absolutely correct. 

Like the popular film "Hidden Figures", the 2011 play Silent Sky by playwright Lauren Gunderson, now making it's Chicago Premiere, tells a very important real life example of how women have been making significant contributions to Science and the Arts against almost impossible odds due to sexism in the work place. Leavitt is wonderfully played with a great zesty and nerdy enthusiasm by Cassandra Bissell who adds just the right amount of seditious touch to the headstrong and very determined character. She is one of the women termed "computers" by their male employers who has been given the great "honor" of painstakingly cataloging all the stars in the sky captured on glass plates by a telescope. As a new employee, she is never allowed to operate the high-powered telescope or use privately her own ideas to validate her own discoveries while earning a whopping $.25 an hour. 

Leavitt is a proud, brilliant Radcliffe graduate. She jokes with her male supervisor Peter Shaw (keenly played by Wardell Julius Clark) that she and he are in fact "colleagues" that "Radcliffe is basically Harvard in skirts." As they fall in love with each other, he begins to soften on some of his more sexist behaviors including "borrowing" ideas from Leavitt to give to the professor (to whom she will never directly report) her discoveries by trying to claim them as his own. Leavitt is hired as one of Harvard astronomer Dr. Edward Charles Pickering's "computers" or, as they were referred to as "Pickering's Harem”.

Leavitt's work came at a time when we as earthlings had no idea where we were located in the Milky Way nor did we know how far away the billions of stars and galaxies made visible by the super powerful new telescope really are from our planet. Leavitt observes closely the luminosity of a class of stars known as Cepheid variables. Others had thought their flashes of light completely random, but through years of study and an epiphany provided by her musically inclined sister, Margaret (Haley Rice), who is composing a symphony in between giving birth to multiple children, Leavitt discovers that the stars are actually making sounds, a music of the stars. This eventually provided the ONLY key to measuring the distance between Earth and other galaxies. Creating the standard to measure the distance of stars from Earth, many male astronomers like Edwin Hubble greedily feasted on her published work to make names for themselves but poor Henrietta dies of cancer before one of them finally realizes she deserves to be nominated for, and win, the Nobel Prize - but the Nobel is not given posthumously and so she was never even nominated for it. 

Annie Cannon (Jeannie Affelder) and Willamina Fleming (Belinda Bremner) play her fellow "computers" with a lusty, strong intelligence. The three characters develop a genuine family, a sisterhood, believing in Henrietta and encouraging her to take her work home with her (the glass plates are not allowed to leave the observatory) even when she is forced to move home to Wisconsin to take care of her dying father. 

In the end, Henrietta gives up a promising offer of marriage to Shaw, the chance to have children of her own, and even her dream of traveling the world in order to complete her work. 

Although I thought the gray monotone set in the chapel at Mayslake Peabody Estate was awfully depressing and didn't change enough to give us the sense of her whole life passing through it's dull indistinguishable doors, we are finally rewarded with the lighting display and music at the end of the show thanks to John "Smooch" Medina's projections, combined with Michael McNamara's lights and Christopher Kriz's musical score. The entire effect was spectacular, almost as if we are finally able to see the universe through Henrietta's passionate, intelligent eyes.   

There really needs to be more biographical plays like this one written with respect and sympathy about women who have changed our place in the world for the better - forever. It is a terrible waste of human intelligence and a dirty shame that if you mention the name Henrietta Swan Leavitt to anyone girl child or even adult today that her life will ring no bells, her name strike no sense of recognition, gratefulness ignored for the contributions she made and the doors she broke down for female scientists to come. 

Touching, beautiful and inspiring.

I highly recommend this thoughtful, poetic and understanding production for showing that some women will give up everything for the love of their work and dedication to humanity. Remembering theses outstanding individuals inspires and empowers us all, male or female, to chase our dreams to the end. 

Superbly directed by Melanie Keller, Silent Sky is being performed at Mayslake Peabody Estate in Oakbrook through April 30th. For more information on this wonderful show or to purchase tickets, click here.