.Rock This World

Two musicals pay homage to past generations.

It’s a truism that some histories are better expressed through song,
though it’s quite difficult to capture a particular epoch with an
explosive musical soundtrack, especially if you want the soundtrack to
endure twenty years later. But some people manage to do it well. Among
them is local jazz vocalist and composer Molly Holm, the woman behind a
new Shotgun Players production about African-American women working in
Richmond’s Henry Kaiser Shipyards during WWII. Called This World in
a Woman’s Hands
, the play uses jazz, spirituals, and work songs to
shore up the sentiment in a story that’s as much about old Jim Crow as
it is about Rosie the Riveter. The play strains to be contemporary even
as it travels back in time.

Such tension doesn’t always become a play, but in this case, it
works. In fact, This World‘s success owes to a delicate balance
of music, writing, and stagecraft. The play takes place in a set made
to look like a factory, all wood trusses and two-by-fours with a
shipping crane etched on the skyline. In one corner sits bassist Marcus
Shelby, visible to the audience but virtually concealed beneath the
scaffolding. Members of the nine-woman cast scrabble about the set with
their rivets and welding tools, building new victory warships while
their men fight overseas. The women sing as they work, combining
multi-part harmonies with vocal percussion (oonka cheeka oonka
cheeka
) to replicate the sound of hammers hitting steel. They read
letters from their husbands, quote the poet Lorca, and volley insults.
They include among their ranks several southern transplants, including
protagonist Gloria B. Cutting (Margo Hall), a well-read Latina
immigrant with socialist leanings (Dena Martinez), a few working class
white women, and even an aspiring jazz singer (the exceptionally
talented Rebecca Frank). All coexist more or less peacefully in a
workplace plagued by the same inequities as society at large.

This World spawned from the same team (composer Holm,
dramatist Marcus Gardley, director Aaron Davidman), that produced the
2006 Shotgun play Love Is a Dream House in Lorin, which also
documented an obscure piece of East Bay history. Young, Oakland-born
playwright Gardley is ambitious in scope. In Lorin, he
chronicled two hundred years in a South Berkeley neighborhood; in
This World he revisits a period marked by productivity,
population booms, and unions that demanded equal pay across racial
lines. Gardley also looks at the more sinister moments in this story,
such as the Port Chicago explosion that killed 320 servicemen, 202 of
them African-American. In the play’s second half he draws connections
to modern-day Richmond, with its violence and economic blight. He
abruptly fast-forwards to a Tent City in the Iron Triangle, where
former shipbuilder Gloria G. Cutting, now in her eighties, hands out
apple fritters to young protesters. The shift is a little disorienting
and it’s not entirely clear what point Gardley is trying to make
(characters make vague references to the factory closures and economic
decline after WWII, but that argument seems hazy, at best). It’s the
only extraneous part in an otherwise airtight script.

The rest of the play works beautifully. Shelby and the cast provide
lovely interpretations of Holm’s score, which imports some decidedly
modern harmonies into an old work-song template. The women in this play
have an ingrained rhythmic command, conveyed in their assembly line
movements and the orchestrated sound of their tools. (Sometimes all you
hear is a low hum, a bass ostinato, and the pang of a hammer.) Holm’s
music brings shape and texture to the story. More importantly, it helps
bring out the music in Gardley’s writing, which combines its didactic
storyline with poetry, homiletic language, and even a bit of magical
realism (in a myth about Richmond’s “Wisdom Tree” that ties everything
together). Coupled with Shelby and Davidman, these artists show
incredible chemistry. Hopefully Shotgun will coral them again, to
vivify another piece of East Bay lore.

Just as hard manual labor is grist for the music in This
World
, hardcore leisure inspired the soundtrack of 1967 “tribal
love-rock” music Hair, now enjoying a revival with Alameda Civic
Light Opera under the direction of Jeff Teague. Known for portraying
the anxieties of Vietnam War-era adolescents in such infectiously peppy
songs as “Aquarius,” “Manchester, England,” and “Let the Sunshine In,”
it’s one of the most enduring Broadway musicals — definitely the
only one that can make a happy romp-and-stomp out of things like
masturbation, miscegenation, sodomy, drug use, poverty, Draft card
burning, and a generational rift. For all its provocations, Hair
couldn’t quite withstand the test of time: It’s definitely locked in a
particular Greenwich Village counterculture that expired in the early
1970s. Yet, the themes have enough parallels with today’s war in Iraq
that Hair still resonates with modern audiences.

Loyal to the original script, ACLO’s production combines bright,
pastel-colored sets and era-appropriate costumes (bell bottoms,
bandanas, India prints, baby dolls, tie-dye) with a wall-to-wall rock
soundtrack in which every song bleeds into the next. The songs are
immortal, and this ensemble gives them the heft and spirit they deserve
— buoyed by stand-out vocalists Paulette Herring, as Dionne, and
Ryan Rigazzi, as Claude. Yet, what distinguishes this rendition isn’t
the music per se (some of the singers are quite good, while others flub
the high notes), but a slide projection in the background that shows
footage of the Civil Rights movement, choppers in Vietnam, US soldiers,
posters for Woodstock, and vintage album covers. There’s a lot of
getting-down-with-the-audience in this production, which opens with
actors milling through Kofman auditorium in their odd hippie apparel,
placing their hands on people’s heads, transmitting auras and thanking
everyone for showing up. Thus, they make a “be-in” of what’s actually a
pretty voyeuristic play (as underscored by the naked scene at the end
of the first act). Not quite the Sixties, but it’s still resonant
nostalgia. “Let the Sunshine In” sounds as good as it ever did.

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