Walker
By Derek Walcott. Music by Galt MacDermot. Directed by Wesley Savick. Music direction by Phillip Woods and Merle Perkins. Choreography by Adrienne T. Hawkins. Set design by Richard Chambers. Costumes by Kristin Loeffler. Lighting by Karim Badwan. Sound Design by Haddon S. Kime. With Jonathan Earl Peck, Merle Perkins, Will Lyman, Edwin McDonough, Stacy Rock, J. Bernard Calloway, Stephanie Marson Lee, Andrea Lyman, Gamalia Pharms, and Kathryn Woods. At Boston Playwrights’ Theatre through November 18.

How quickly history is made and forgotten! And how fast-fading is the memory of its heroes until an artist returns them to life. In 1993, with composer T.J. Anderson, Nobel-winning poet and playwright Derek Walcott wrote an opera called Walker that was based on the true story of freed slave David Walker, who lived in Boston in the early years of the 19th century. As Walker began to understand the condition of America’s black men and women, who were enslaved in the South and segregated and insulted in the North, his anger grew until he released it in the form of a revolutionary pamphlet. His 1829 Appeal was circulated and smuggled throughout the country, but it was the stuff of sedition — exhorting the slaves to " kill or be killed " and declaring all whites to be the enemy.

Some 30 years before the outbreak of the Civil War, Walker’s printing press was his weapon, but it also became his death warrant. As the pamphlet spread, its writer became a danger to the white establishment. Walker died mysteriously in 1830, but his words lived on in his friend William Garrison’s publication The Liberator and later as an inspiration to the Abolitionists.

Walker has been retooled as a dramatic play, with music by Galt MacDermot (composer of Hair) replacing Anderson’s opera score. And the new piece is being performed in honor of the 20th anniversary of Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, which Walcott founded in 1981, shortly after joining the BU faculty. The drama is set in Walker’s home on Brattle Street, on the day before his murder. Veering from realism to fantasy, it’s presided over by a Figure dressed in black who hovers in the snow outside Walker’s window. Will Lyman, whose melodious voice gives even more weight to Walcott’s mix of poetic forms, makes the Figure into a personification of the Grim Reaper that strode through the Dance of Death pageants of the middle ages. There’s also a chorus of four women who enter on cue to sing and dance out the songs.

Director Wesley Savick has staged the play as a ritual, despite the homy scenes between Walker and his wife, Eliza (portrayed by the golden-voiced Merle Perkins), who relates a recurring dream about finding her husband spread-eagled in the snow. Walcott also entrusts Eliza with the theme of being displaced in cold, forbidding New England, far from the warm red earth and green pine trees of the couple’s native North Carolina. Edwin McDonough makes Garrison a gentle, kindly man bewildered by Walker’s repudiation of their friendship. Stacy Rock as Catherine, the white Irish maid rescued by Eliza from the poorhouse, and J. Bernard Calloway as the feisty black man Barbados complete the mostly Equity company.

In the title role, Jonathan Earl Peck suggests the complexity of Walker as a man wavering between a thundering rage and the more human fear that a stranger might be coming for him in the night. Peck is a handsome, charismatic actor who turns Walker into something of a Superman, with booming voice to match his outsize motivations.

The songs are decorously placed throughout the impressive if somewhat ponderous evening. MacDermot’s score includes a hymnlike anthem to the artists and writers of the black movement who liberated the spirit of their people. The composer has also written a sentimental paean to Ireland for Catherine and a stunning gospel dirge that Eliza sings over her husband’s body. The obligatory big number comes in act two as a melding of Walcott’s poetry as recited by the Figure and a chanting by Eliza that’s backed by African-infused movements for the chorus devised by choreographer Adrienne T. Hawkins. Richard Chambers contributes a two-story setting that looks like the interior of any New England village-green church and is as lofty as Walcott’s aim in resurrecting Walker’s prophetic vision.

In the end, though, despite the competent hands at work on this production, there is the sense that Walker needs to be read as well as seen. Walcott’s poetic language is too dense to be comprehended easily as dialogue, except as a road map to the inspiring story.

Issue Date: November 8-15, 2001

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