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One Mo' Time |
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Author: Vernel Bagneris
Reviewer: David L. Steinhardt for Theatre Reviews Limited |
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How Real Is Real? "One Mo' Time" Starts the Williamstown Season
Last week, I heard a lecture at Bennington College by the eminent editor C. Michael Curtis, in which he distinguished between two types of stories: "what I call What-it's-like-to-be-there stories, as opposed to What-happened-when stories." He left no doubt that, although there are exceptions, he prefers "What-happened-when stories." These stories root the reader in the specific, as opposed to those which simply set a mood and let the reader bask in it. The distinction exists onstage as well.
  
The Williamstown Theatre Festival opened its 47th season June 21, with a new production of "One Mo' Time," Vernel Bagneris's 1979 "what-it's-like-to-be-there" musical that has five characters, 29 songs, and hardly any plot. What's exceptional about the piece is that even without a story, it manages to convey at least as much social relevance and cultural history as some other stage pieces that strain much harder for that effect.
"Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," for instance, marketed itself (in 1984) as a play about Ma Rainey at a recording session, but was instead playwright August Wilson's drawing-room drama about oppressed blacks turning on each other. (One of Ma Rainey's musicians ends up killing another over a scuffed shoe.) I can still remember the audience conversation opening night on Broadway: "I thought it was going to be about Ma Rainey!" The disappointment was palpable, although the drama was well-written and well-played. It even made a star of Charles S. "Roc" Dutton-who played
the killer musician, several years after finishing a sentence for manslaughter himself.
The brilliant director of that production, Lloyd Richards, sits on the Board of Trustees of the
Williamstown Theatre Festival, so he presumably approves of the selection of "One Mo' Time" to open the new season. And with good reason. "One Mo' Time" is entertainment with a bonus, just enough social history for a sophisticated audience to fill in the blanks, while putting onstage
nothing you'd want to shield the kids from.
The slim story is this: Big Bertha's vaudeville company is two players short tonight. Edna the exotic dancer is in jail for "hustling" a train conductor, while Augie the funnyman has run off with the $100 he was supposed to bail her out with. That leaves Bertha, company manager Papa Du
(Vernel Bagneris, who wrote and directed the show), and two other women to do all the numbers themselves, under threat not to be paid if they don't fulfill their contract for "four singers, an exotic dancer, and a blackface comedian."
The dramatic vignettes fill about thirty minutes of a two-hour show. The rest, with a five-piece band onstage, consists of vaudeville numbers, including "Cake-Walking Babies," "Right Key but the Wrong Keyhole," and "A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight." (I'd mention who wrote these old-time classics, but the program fails to note a single music or lyric credit.)
"One Mo' Time" is a faux backstage drama, but I have to admit I found it more affecting than the vastly more serious "Ma Rainey." With that play, I found myself wondering whether any of the legendary blues singer's band members ever really offed one another, and if not, then how metaphorical
the whole evening of theatre was supposed to be. "One Mo' Time" delivers exactly what it promises, entertainment with only a mere glimpse behind the scenes. One of the women, Ma Reed, ends up doing the exotic dance number (quite fully dressed in a minstrel-show grass skirt and coconut-shell bra ensemble) while Papa Du does the "old, tired" blackface routine.
Although the four players laugh about outwitting the white theatre owner's threats not to pay them, that character does not appear again onstage to confirm the contract fulfilled. The show, instead, gracefully fades out, with a slight increase in intentional artifice toward the end, with the implied wall between the vaudeville stage and the dressing room sets dissolving for a very
affecting final number, "Muddy Water," before a rousing finale plays us out.
By the end of the evening the audience is fully entertained, while being made vividly aware of several things: Black vaudevillians worked like hell for theatre owners who would gladly withhold their tiny paychecks whenever they could get away with it; the membrane between the exotic acts and
prostitution was porous; and despite the artistry of their performances, black vaudevillians were still required to ridicule themselves to make a show complete. No one got killed onstage, but I doubt I could have been better educated about the oppression and suffering of these entertainers, who laid the groundwork for much of what still fills our stages and screens.
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The Williamstown season runs through August. "One Mo' Time" closed on July 1. Next up on the main stage will be Kate Burton and Dylan Baker in Darko Tresnjak's production of "The Winter's Tale," while the hush-hush workshop run of Howard M Gould's new play, "Diva," runs on the second
stage from July 11-22, with Bebe Neuwirth (Lillith on Cheers), Kurtwood Smith (Red on That '70s Show) and Eric Bogosian. The box office opens for the week 10am Tuesdays, which is the best time to pick up newly released tickets. WTFestival.org
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