E-Mail This Article to a Friend Black power The fifth annual African American Theatre Festival BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

If you were assembling a festival of African-American theater, chances are you’d approach it on an era-by-era basis, making sure to incorporate a range of voices, perspectives, and issues from key points in history. That’s what Our Place Theatre Project does, and the productions that make up the two-week event paint a robust picture of the black experience in America. By turns carnal and æthereal, salty and tender, cynical and hopeful, provocative and insipid, the offerings find their directors and actors fixed on the invigorating rhythms of the scripts, an assortment of the elegiac, the jive-talkin’, and the street-slang cutting.

With this, its fifth AATF, Our Place marks a turning point: courtesy of the Huntington Theatre Company, it has taken up residence in the new Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, an upgrade from the less posh locales of past fests. The casts and crews command the sleek, spacious performance space with an assurance that says this is where they’re meant to be. Given James P. Byrne’s versatile core set of a slanted platform, the space easily transforms from the modest slave quarters of Cynthia Robinson’s Ascension to the bone-simple streets of Harlem for George C. Wolfe’s Spunk to the Philly ghettos of Ed Bullins’s shorts. (The festival also includes "New Works," seven one-acts by New England writers.)

Ascension, here in its world premiere, is styled on slave narratives of centuries past. Ruthie (a charismatic Jacqui Parker) and Jacob (the burly, brooding David Curtis, prizefighter-like in stature and emotional punch) are slaves and lovers on a plantation. Their master prides himself on being a Christian man, and he asserts that he’s securing his place in Heaven by letting his slaves live together and even marry. But his religiosity is swaddled in hypocrisy: since he bought Ruthie years ago, he’s been waving the ownership card as justification for raping her. Jacob is helpless but incensed; as Ruthie’s friend Tillie (Linda Starks) tells her, "Your job is to make Jacob forget about Masta."

Robinson’s achievement is the immediacy she brings to her characters, an immediacy that frees Ascension from being a chunk of theatrical amber within which slavery is fossilized. The playwright’s primary interest lies in the issue of ownership: the tensions inherent in the slave-master relationship are wound so tight that irreparable damage is done when it snaps. But then Robinson goes on to show how tenuous such ownership is by contrasting it with the timeless struggle for possession of a lover’s heart. She telegraphs a legacy of agony in a hefty fashion that seems informed by August Wilson’s work, and in the sensitive hands of director Robbie McCauley, the characters’ combustible rage is best conveyed in those moments when the silence is so thick, it would take an ax to make a dimple in it.

No mere sliver of giddy escapism, George C. Wolfe’s adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s short stories ropes you in with its jaunty, jazzy licks. Set in Harlem in the 1940s, and accompanied here by Chick Street Man’s honey-soaked blues-guitar riffs, Spunk offers superficial snapshots of hussies and hepcats. Despite the glistening language, these are trite stories, but director Jeff Robinson fills in the narrative blanks by eliciting a sensual physicality from the actors.

We jump and jive ahead to the 1960s for Those That Came Before, a celebration of Obie winner Ed Bullins’s short works. A key player in the Black Arts Movement, Bullins dissected social dichotomies. In the satiric The Electronic Nigger, he does so by pitting black artists against the white literary establishment in a college classroom. You’d like to think America has come a long way since the civil-rights movement, but the other two plays, set in Philly ghettos, have lost little of their political wallop. Bullins’s plays are so devoid of ’60s jargon, the actors can convey their characters’ disillusions without seeming at all out of date.

The characters in these plays all have qualities they suppress to get along in society. But Jacqui Parker’s talents are no secret. StageSource recognized them last year when it bestowed on her its Theatre Hero Award, and this festival reconfirms her many abilities — from her assertive direction of Bullins’s Clara’s Ole Man to her stepping into a variety of acting roles to her homing in on and showcasing young actors.

The African American Theatre Festival is presented by Our Place Theatre Project at the Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA through January 30. For performance details, see Play by Play.