Jacqui Parker and the Our Place Theatre Project have put together an ambitious three-week African-American Theatre Festival (at the Boston Center for the Arts through January 26). This is the second annual edition of the event, in which seasoned performers, teachers, adult amateurs, and students join forces to present works, established and brand new, that speak to the condition of Black America. The participants act, direct, move scenery, and otherwise pitch in to do the nitty-gritty backstage and technical work. Some pieces and performances shine; others represent work in progress. Everything, however, is carried off with impressive professionalism.

Watching two of the three programs, I got a good sense of the range of ideas, themes, forms, and style that characterize African-American theater past and present. On the first of the two programs called " Those That Came Before, " Ted Shine’s 1969 one-act Contributions looks back to the efforts to integrate the South during the civil-rights movement. A well-educated young black man (Carlton Smith) from the North returns to the home of his grandmother (Anita Hamilton) to take part in a lunch-counter demonstration. The two engage in poignant discussion about the different kinds of courage necessary to be both a modern activist and a traditional " grin and shuffle " assimilationist. Although the young man initially feels some disdain for his grandmother’s get-along-to-get-along modus operandi (which resulted in her son’s going to college), he learns that she had her own powerful ways of coping with her anger at the white man. Directed by Jacqui Parker, the play is both touching and, in its surprise ending, very funny. Hamilton is riveting as the grandmother who carries retribution in a pouch around her neck.

The main event of this bill, Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, a full-length play from 1965 by Lonnie Elders III, examines the disintegration of a black family living in Harlem in the ’60s. Overlong and diffuse, the work — here directed by Vincent Siders — hasn’t aged well. The ways in which things can go wrong for vulnerable African-Americans — the elderly and the young who are poorly educated and impoverished — have gotten even more lethal in the intervening 37 years. And the idea that a father and two sons who won’t work a job can make a killing by selling bootleg corn whisky manufactured in their back-room still is not only hopeless but pathetically outdated. Yet the play has two terrific performances: Harold Hector’s as the stubborn and self-deluded father and Dorian Christian-Baucum’s as his hyperactive, jive-talking scam artist of a younger son. And the sonorous-voiced Naheem Allah is chilling as Blue Haven, the local organized-crime lord.

The " Night of New Works " program comprises five one-act plays that have been developed in workshops at Our Place Theatre. You, by Frank Shefton, examines a young couple who face the painfully funny consequences of the man’s envy of his girlfriend’s professional and personal success. Keith Mascoll is hilarious as Jermaine, who dresses in his girlfriend’s clothes to see what it might be like to " be " her.

Abria Smith’s Out like That is an ironic look at African-Americans’ ambivalence about the portrayal of black people in Hollywood movies. Renita Martin’s The Way Home is a cryptic and pretentiously surreal deathbed scene of deliverance. Half My Name/La Mitad de Mi Nombre is Candy Batista’s sweet memoir (co-written with Jacqui Parker) of emigrating from the Dominican Republic to the United States, the rather rough assimilation she experienced, and the gratitude she feels toward her strong and wise mother. Batista plays both her mother and her current self. Maria Arroyo is touching as the Young Candy.

Jacqui Parker’s Real Time could be the script for a TV cop show. It examines what could happen when a teenage girl is accused of shooting another girl and then placed in a program called " Care for One, Care for All, " where she is assigned to take care of her paralyzed victim. There are nice portrayals here of teenagers by Eboni Walcott, Emily Cruz, and Davan Johnson. Ireta Joseph is powerful as the smart and insightful Detective Wilson.

The festival also includes, under the " Those That Came Before " rubric, a production of Alice Childress’s 1969 Wine in the Wilderness. Set during the Harlem riots of the late ’60s, it’s about the values of the black bourgeoisie and centers on an artist painting the triptych of the title. Lack of space precluded my reviewing the entire triptych of this second annual African-American Theatre Festival, but two out of three aren’t bad.

Issue Date: January 10-17, 2002

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