While Christian zealots eagerly await the Rapture, many other creatures suffer from the pain of a loving relationship's rupture due to frayed emotions or the death of a partner. In the summer of 2018, news reports focused on a female killer whale whose calf died about a half hour after being born. The grieving Orca (J35) spent 17 days pushing her dead calf through nearly 1,000 miles of water off the Pacific Northwest coast. I strongly recommend reading an extremely poignant piece by Tom Hallman, Jr. entitled "Day After Day, Outside the Door, Showing What a Broken Heart Looks Like" that was recently published by The Oregonian.
TheatreFIRST recently presented the world premiere of Cleavon Smith's two-hander entitled The Last Sermon of Sister Imani. Directed by Michael Gene Sullivan, the play's promotional blurb explained that:
"College friends Danielle and Adrian had very different upbringings, yet with a shared love of music, and aspirations to change the world, they became music stars on the rise. Just as their second album of socially-centered hip-hop goes platinum, Danielle’s brother is shot and killed by police in her parents’ backyard. Grieving her brother’s death and facing what seem to her as the limits of pop culture activism, Danielle is muted for years. Danielle comes out of her reclusive state with a new name, Sister Imani, and a new spiritualism that quickly leads to the formation of an organization called The People."
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| Poster art for The Last Sermon of Sister Imani |
"Around the same time, Adrian wins a seat in Congress and separately the two rise in stature. As Adrian is running a strong U.S. Senate campaign and it seems as if the party of the left can win a majority, The People and Sister Imani are seen as pushing potential swing votes to the right. In their first meeting in six years, with a sense that the fate of the country will be decided in this conversation, Adrian and Sister Imani try to win the other over to their way of seeing the world and the course of action needed for a truly just society."
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| Jasmine Williams (Adrian) and Dezi Solèy (Danielle) in The Last Sermon of Sister Imani (Photo by: Jay Yamada) |
It is a rare and worrying phenomenon to witness a 70-minute play (despite the proven dramatic power of its two actors) implode under the sheer weight of its creator's relentless didacticism. In his program note, Cleavon Smith writes:
"The myth of perfect answers and perfectly aligned allies is what the two friends in The Last Sermon of Sister Imani grapple with as their past catches up with their present. It is an imperfect play, but the exigency of the wake-up call many received on the evening of first Monday after the first Tuesday of November 2016 demands a certain kind of imperfection each completely embraces. This is not an excuse for any of the play's shortcomings, but rather my sharing that the play is an invitation to unpack its questions, to offer up answers, to listen; in other words, to participate with immediacy however each of us can, in the creation of our next."
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| Jasmine Williams as Adrian in a scene from The Last Sermon of Sister Imani (Photo by: Jay Yamada) |
The play's most glaring faults are easily identifiable. Frequent flashbacks between the present day Danielle (Dezi Solèy) and Adrian (Jasmine Williams) and the two women as they were back in their college days are not clearly delineated. While Smith can craft some beautiful monologues, a tendency to drown their beauty in heavily academic rhetoric drains them of their dramatic power. The saving grace of the production was the incandescent presence and fierce energy coming from Jasmine Williams as Adrian. Though well-intentioned on spiritual and ideological grounds, Danielle's rejection and waste of a home-baked sweet potato pie from Adrian's mother didn't ring true (and I'm not saying that just because everyone supposedly loves pie).
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While some complain that “the love that dare not speak its name” has morphed into “the love that can’t shut the fuck up,” I tip my hat to filmmaker Ofir Raul Graizer who, in his first feature film, has found an often and easily overlooked protagonist: the gay introvert who falls in love with a married bisexual man who regularly comes to town on business but whose family lives in another country. |
| Tim Kalkhof stars as Thomas in The Cakemaker |
Quietly and beautifully brought to life by Tim Kalkhof, Thomas is a young German baker who was raised by his grandmother. Having fallen in love with an Israeli businessman who travels to Berlin on a monthly basis, when Oren (Roy Miller) asks Thomas why he has never been in a relationship with another gay man, he replies "I have my health, I have my house, I have my work, and I have you (even if that's only once a month)." Then Oren suddenly disappears. When Thomas learns that Oren died in an automobile accident in Israel, he travels to Jerusalem and, with his usual surgical precision and ability to go unnoticed, manages to spy on and infiltrate the daily life of his dead lover's widow, Anat (Sarah Adler).
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| Tim Kalkhof stars as Thomas in The Cakemaker |
Using the key to Oren’s gym locker (which the deceased man had accidentally left behind in Thomas’s apartment), he discovers and begins to wear Oren’s bathing suit as a sort of talisman that can help keep his love alive. Seeking employment in the café owned by Oren’s former spouse (who eventually hires him to help out in an emergency), Thomas slowly becomes a part of Anat’s livelihood and extended family over the strong objections of her more religious brother.
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| Tim Kalkhof (Thomas), Sarah Adler (Anat), and Tamir Ben Yehuda (Itai) in a scene from The Cakemaker |
Moti (Zohar Strauss) does not want a German working in his sister's café for fear that it could jeopardize the business's kosher certification and warns her impressionable young son, Itai (Tamir Ben Yehuda), not to eat any food that Thomas makes. Anat, however, is not religious and has no desire to pursue a religious lifestyle. Nor does she want her child to grow up living in fear of “the other.”
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| Sarah Adler (Anat) and Tim Kalkhof (Thomas) in a scene from The Cakemaker |
As Thomas’s baking skills add to the financial success of the café, his quiet warmth helps to draw Anat out of her grief and Itai out of his shell. Anat's mother-in-law, Hannah (Sandra Sade), also takes a liking to Thomas and, in a touching scene at her apartment, asks if he would like to see the room in which Oren grew up.
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| Sandra Sade as Oren's mother in The Cakemaker |
On the day Anat finally gets up the courage to listen to the messages that were left on Oren’s answering machine, she learns Thomas’s shocking secret. The baker’s carefully constructed charade disintegrates and he is forced to leave Israel on short notice. Though the heartbroken Thomas returns to his bakery in Berlin, life may have another surprise in store for him.
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| Tim Kalkhof stars as Thomas in The Cakemaker |
With an appealing musical score by Dominique Charpentier, The Cakemaker is a revelatory achievement for Grazier's first feature film. This talented filmmaker has managed to shape Thomas's experience without guns, drugs, or domestic violence while capturing the steadfast (though misguided) devotion of an introvert who desperately wants to hold onto a love that, though suddenly lost, so strongly sustained him in the past.
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| Poster art for The Cakemaker |
In his Director’s statement, Grazier notes that:
"The Cakemaker is a melodrama set in Jerusalem. The narrative moves, the settings and the characters, are of my own private memory and experiences that shaped the 6-1/2 years I worked on this film. Man-woman, gay-straight, religious-secular, Berlin-Jerusalem, Middle East-Europe -- from these conflicts I was able to create a cinematic story where, as in life, there are no answers to all the questions. Instead, there is love for people and cinema. It’s a story about the attempt to put aside definitions of nationality, sexuality, and religion. It is my story."The Cakemaker is also a story that will push people's buttons in a surprisingly healthy way (in large part due to the solid, yet restrained performance by Tim Kalkhof in the title role). Here's the trailer:
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Many immigrant families include elders who live with and help take care of the children. As a result, bilingualism become a fact of life. As I was growing up, my parents would often converse with my grandparents in Yiddish. Like many children, I assumed they used the mamaloshen (mother tongue) when discussing matters that "der kinder" were not supposed to hear.  |
| Me (at nine months of age) in the arms of my maternal grandparents, Nathan and Ida Schreibman |
As my cultural horizons broadened, I was exposed to families in which Armenian, Portuguese, Tagalog, Russian, Hebrew, and Spanish were spoken as fluently as English. Over time, I learned that as a family’s youngest generation was assimilated into their new culture (through the school system as well as their social interactions with other kids), it was the children who learned how to read and write a new language and were often called upon to translate information for the adults in their family.
Jewish and non-Jewish theatregoers in New York have recently been impressed by the emotional power and musicality of spoken Yiddish while attending the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene's revival of Fiddler on the Roof. For the Nigerian-American playwright Mfoniso Udofia (whose native Ibibio is a language blessed with a strong tonal musicality), this probably comes as no surprise.
“In Nigeria, there is a multiplicity of languages. I’m not sure you can write truly authentic Nigerian plays without using different languages within one whole," she states. "Ibibio is a tonal language akin to Mandarin; it has the same implicit difficulty. If you don’t hear pitch, learning Ibibio can be really difficult. ‘Usung’ (no-pitch movement) and ‘usung’ (tone-step down on the last syllable)” are two different words -- one means road and the other means fufu (a starchy food we eat). The language is truly a music and it would be false not to have the language within the play. It was particularly important for me to write about West African, Nigerian, and Ibibio migration here because lineage is important for me. When you come from that culture and come into this culture, what do you retain and how?”
A graduate of A.C.T.’s Master of Fine Arts Program, Udofia is in the midst of writing an ambitious nine-play cycle of dramas about a Nigerian-American family. The origin story of the Ufot family (Sojourners) was produced by Magic Theatre in 2016, followed by the third play in the cycle, runboyrun. The American Conservatory Theater recently presented the West Coast premiere of the fourth play in Udofia's cycle (Her Portmanteau), which will be followed next month by the Magic Theatre’s production of the fifth play, entitled In Old Age (both works are being staged by Victor Malana Maog). The Filipino-American director started working with the Nigerian-American playwright back in 2013 during a reading of Sojourners under the auspices of The Playwrights Realm. As he recalls:
“Mfoniso opened up the opportunity for me to work with her again on Her Portmanteau at SPACE on Ryder Farm (a new play incubator based in upstate New York). Mfoniso and I would spend hours on new pages. Oftentimes, I would ask her to read the entire play to me (just like playwright Arthur Miller used to do at first rehearsals) so that I could funnel all the language and all the intention of the characters through her voice. Mfoniso is also a magnificent actor. Through her voice, I heard the musicality more. I also started to feel the internal incinerator of the characters -- the hunger driving them forward. As a person who was born in the Philippines and raised in America, I’m interested in stories that wrestle with otherness. I’m interested in the alienation and separation that can happen between two countries and when those beliefs and expectations create friction.”
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| Eunice Woods (Iniabasi) and Kimberly Scott (Abasiama) in a scene from Her Portmanteau (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
“This play explores characters who are not pictured or seen, but who haunt the story. What’s most striking are the men who populate this play, but never appear (fathers, husbands). In a way, this is a play about aftermaths and 'what-could-have-beens.' When you think of mother-daughter stories, audiences sometimes yearn to have a complete resolution. Our unconscious impulse might be to flatten foreign characters and easily box in narratives. In this play, all three women are incredible heroes. All of them can be monsters, too. Each is simultaneously wronged in some way and longing for a deep connection. Mfoniso’s sound gave me some of that insight. I want to follow her impulses and follow the danger and love in the relationships. What is said and unsaid? What is Americanness? What is Africanness? What does it mean to be Nigerian, or “hybrid” (Nigerian American)?”
Each of the women in Udofia's tense drama arrives onstage with a shit-ton of emotional baggage. Abasiama Ufot (Kimberly Scott) is the matriarch of the family, who arrived in the United States in 1978 with her first husband, Ukpong Ekpeyong, and settled in Houston where they were both working toward undergraduate degrees. Unfortunately, Ukpong was a loser who spent all of his money on records and beer and eventually dropped out of school. In order to support them, the very pregnant Abasiama took a night-time job at a gas station where she spent her spare time reading biology textbooks.
On the night when Abasiama went into labor, she was taken to a hospital by Nsikan Disciple Ufot, another Nigerian student who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. When Ukpong’s student visa expired, the young couple decided that Ukpong should take their newborn daughter, Iniabasi (whose name translates as “In God’s Time”), back to Nigeria with him, where a community of extended family could help raise her until Abasiama could finish her degree and graduate.
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| Eunice Woods as Iniabasi Ekpeyong in a scene from Her Portmanteau (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
Thirty years later, the adult Iniabasi (Eunice Woods) arrives at JFK on a freezing winter night expecting to be picked up by Abasiama who, unfortunately, has been delayed while driving down from Amherst, Massachusetts in a rental car. Having been raised in a very different culture, Iniabasi is angry and suspicious when a strange woman (Aneisa J. Hicks) approaches her at a pay phone and introduces herself as Iniabasi’s half sister, Adiaha. By the time they arrive at Adiaha’s apartment in Inwood, Iniabasi is cold, depressed, angry, exhausted, and quick to criticize the paintings on the walls that were created by Adiaha’s ex-lover, Kim.
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| Kimberly Scott (Abasiama) and Eunice Woods (Iniabasi) in a scene from Her Portmanteau (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
Eventually Abasiama (whose name translates as “God’s love”) arrives, by which time each woman is operating at a level of frustration that requires extreme support from the others. Each is wrapped in an angry cloud of confusion and wounded ego, yet must figure out how to communicate with someone they may be too angry with at the moment to trust.
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| Eunice Woods as Iniabasi Ekpeyong in a scene from Her Portmanteau (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
Just when the tension seems to be thawing, the phone rings. It's a call from Abasiama’s second husband, Nsikan Disciple Ufot, who suffers from obsessive paranoia as a result of a gruesome family tragedy that occurred when the Biafran War came to his village in 1968. With Abasiama out of the room trying to comfort her husband, the two half-sisters try to dispel some of the negative energy poisoning the atmosphere.
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| Eunice Woods (Iniabasi) and Aneisa Hicks (Adiaha) in a scene from Her Portmanteau (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
Although she may not understand it, Iniabasi has arrived with unreasonable expectations of her relations from what she has seen on their Facebook pages. In addition to thinking that America is still the land of miraculous opportunities, she still carries a grudge because Adiaha failed to fulfill a promise made during her visit to Nigeria when she was eight years old. Iniabasi has no knowledge of Abasiama's financial struggle to save up for her daughter's airfare during a bleak economic crisis; nor is she aware of the bureaucratic nightmare her mother has faced trying to provide immigration authorities with pictures of Iniabasi's young son, Kufre, in order to bring him to America with his mother. Meanwhile, Abasiama and Adiaha are caught up in the longstanding tensions between an overbearing mother who is a control freak and her lesbian daughter whose most effective emotional outlet for coping with anger has proven to be throwing dishes and vases against a wall.
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| Kimberly Scott (Missing) and Aneisa Hicks (Adiaha) in a scene from Her Portmanteau (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
With costumes by Sarita Fellows, lighting by Yael Lubetzky, and sound design by Jake Rodriguez, most of A.C.T.’s production of Her Portmanteau takes place on David Israel Reynoso’s set for Adiaha’s apartment. I did, however, get a kick out the opening bank of push-button pay phones (and the assumption that they still worked). By the time Udofia’s family drama finds a pathway to peace, the audience has developed a much deeper appreciation of each character’s hopes and fears. As the playwright notes: "Everybody in this play (as well as the audience) has a belief system that is not wrong, but is not quite right either. Sojourners focuses on how a woman deals with the Nigerian dream that she has for herself and that shredding against the American reality she’s in. Her Portmanteau is the culmination of that -- her looking back after 36 years and saying, ‘Did I make the right decision?’”
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| Kimberly Scott as Abasiama Ufot in a scene from Her Portmanteau (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
A.C.T. has already commissioned Udofia to write one of the three remaining plays in the Ufot family cycle. “It’s a children’s play (probably centered in New York) in which Iniabasi’s son, Kufre, will come to America and have to figure out how to live in the Little Senegal area of Harlem,” she says. In the meantime, performances of Her Portmanteau continue through March 30 at the Strand Theater (click here for tickets). Performances of In Old Age will be presented at Magic Theatre from March 27 to April 21 (click here for tickets).
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