Word for Word Theatre Production Brings Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" to San Francisco's Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, February 5^th to March 22nd, 2008  

by Steven Mayers
posted April 8, 2008 @ 2:13pm PST

written by James Baldwin
directed by Margo Hall
score by Marcus Shelby

A lone spotlight is ignited and the bare stage of the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre lights up with the anonymous glow of a city street corner: “I read about in the paper, in the subway, on the way to work. I read it, and I couldn’t believe it, and I read it again.” With an abstract backdrop of painted city streets at night as the only prop, Peter Macon, unaccompanied on the stage at this point, is the play: he is himself, his brother, Sonny, the city, the subway cars, the sounds, and the smells of gritty Manhattan.  The voice of Sonny enters at first in the sparse blues lines that seem to come out of the darkness of the streets – muted trumpets, trickling piano trills, raspy tenor saxophones – and then through the narrator’s evocative remembrances, and then finally form himself, as Da’Mon Vann enters the stage, slouchy and nervous, like a maladjusted teenager.

The Story

The Harlem that novelist and essayist, James Baldwin, brought to life in his numerous works served as an existential microcosm of the black American’s sufferings in the early 20^th Century in the hands of a racist government and society, economic despair and the incarcerating cement and bared wire that delineated the borough.  Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” originally appeared in 1948, in his eminent collection of short stories, Going to Meet the Man, which brings out the dark, confined, and anxious milieu of his Harlem in every story, from the “The Rockpile,” to “The Outing,” to “Sonny’s Blues.”  “Sonny’s Blues” is narrated by a schoolteacher and family man in Harlem, and is centered on his reminiscing about his brother, a jazz pianist, who had fallen into the hands of heroine at a young age, and whom he had not been involved with since hearing that he had been arrested for narcotics possession.  The main theme of the story is the discrepancy between Sonny’s inner-world of music and emotion and the external world through which his brother has, until the story’s end, seen Sonny.

In the cathartic finale of the story, the narrator beholds his brother as he performs at a jazz club, and is drawn into his world for the first time.  While the narrator sees the outside world, the events Sonny has experienced throughout his troubled life, Sonny hears the inside world, live inside of the music.  “Sonny’s fingers filled the air with life, his life.  But that life contained so many others” (Baldwin).    

“Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did” (Baldwin).

Sonny’s need for his brother’s understanding and approval, and his need for ears and hearts other than his own to feel his music, is realized at this point in a redemptive, releasing resolution.

“There was a long pause, while they talked up there in the indigo light and after awhile I saw the girl put a Scotch and milk on top of the piano for Sonny. He didn’t seem to notice it, but just before they started playing again, he sipped from it and looked towards me, and nodded.  Then he put it back on top of the piano.  For me, then, as they began to play again, it glowed and shook above my brother’s head like the very cup of trembling” (Baldwin).

Born in the Harlem Hospital on the second of August, 1924, Baldwin spent his childhood and adolescence soaking in the sights and sounds, living and suffering the life of a poor African American in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance.  Never meeting his real father, he was raised by his mother, Berdis, and her husband, David Baldwin, the son of a woman born into slavery, who she married just after he was born..  In 1948, with only a typewriter and two Bessie Smith records, Baldwin went to London and Paris, where he would exile himself from his known life for the next ten years.  As Nigel Hatton points out in the notes to this edition of “Sonny’s Blues”: 

“Loraine Hansberry said he could ‘articulate the inarticulable.’ Michael Ondaayje called him our 20^th-century artist-saint. Tony Morrison said he made the English language honest, ‘un-gated it for black people so that in your wake we could enter it, occupy it, restructure it in order to accommodate our complicated passion – not our vanities, but our intricate, demanding beauty, our tragic, insistent knowledge, our lived reality, our sleek classical imagination.’”

As an essayist, he articulated the Black American’s struggles, history, racial construction, folk roots, religion, economic inequality, and played a paramount role in teaching both whites and blacks to be free, as he would say, for only if both were free could either be free in this country; he consecrated what he called Black English as a language that had grown out of a “bitter necessity” for Black Americans, who had established their culture in many ways apart from the white culture, to possess their own language.  As a novelist, he was one of these very few, serious writers who was able to capture a glimpse at the human condition in all of its brutality and compassion, nobility and humility, form and chaos, and a glimpse of the deprived contrition of the Black American, through his electric descriptions of his Harlem, an intricate urban microcosm of the black experience in America, and through his narration touched upon the Black American as well as American psyche, his language, his newfound roots, his eccentric inner personalities.  As a short story writer, Baldwin focuses on the symbolic details of his metaphorical Harlem, the rock pile where the boys gather to fight, the fire escapes where others sit and watch in the sweltering Harlem moisture, and the internal minds and thoughts of individual characters. 

James Alan McPherson attributed to Ralph Ellison, the birth of the “blues idiom” in African American letters. “As far as I know, Ellison was the first to define the idiom as an art form,” who “sketched for them the place of black Americans as co-creators of American culture from the beginnings of the American experiment” (A Region Net Home 123, 130).  In both his strong proclamations in his essays, as well as his singular artistic interpretation of Harlem as a microcosm of the black American experience, Baldwin, like Ellison, serves as the prophetic voice of American fiction in the 20^th Century.    

“All I can tell you is that I started writing around the time I began to read.  I was fascinated by words – I don’t know why – and I was fascinated by people.  They are, we are, the greatest spectacle in the universe, the most unpredictable, the most terrifying, sometimes the saddest, sometimes the noblest” (Baldwin).

The Production

After the first originally scheduled three weeks of the performance, the theatre decided to extend the show a full three weeks more to make room for the throngs of spectators that are responding to the play’s astounding critical acclaim.  After rereading James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” after some years, director Margo Hall immediately felt that it should be put on as a Word for Word production as a special tribute to this year’s Black History Month in San Francisco. "Visualizing the piece wasn't difficult," recounts Hall. "Ever since I've worked with Word for Word I can't read a story without visualizing it. I didn't visualize the story's opening moment right away — that took some time. But I clearly saw other parts" (Chad Jones, Inside Bay Area).  

San Francisco’s actor and director, Margo Hall, appeared as the character Fe in Fe in the Desert last year, a play produced by Campo Santo and Intersection for the Arts, a role that was considered one of last year’s bests.  As a director, she has worked as a creative collaborator for Berkley Repertoire Theatre’s production, The People’s Temple, and co-directed Shotgun Players’ Bulrusher, put on at the Ashby Stage.  With Word for Word Theatre Production, Hall has performed in Langston Hughes’ The Blues I’m Playing, Barbara Kingsolver’s Rose Johnny, and Zora Neale Hurston’s The Gilded Six Bits, and directed Alice Murno’s Friend of My Youth and Greg Sarris’ Joy Ride. 

Specializing in theatrical adaptations of short stories, Word for Word Theatre Production’s approach is to keep the stage set sparse, and let the words of the story take flight through dynamic reading and syntactic arrangement, creating a sort of  simultaneous call and response various characters read exerts of the narration in unison.  While most of “Sonny’s Blues” is told in an internal monologue composed of memories of the narrator’s brother, Sonny, delivered powerfully by Peter Macon beneath an isolated spotlight, certain phrases and sentences are spoken by Da’Mon Vann as Sonny, in an ironic third person.  This narrative arrangement really hones in on Baldwin’s words, which hover in the still air and intermingle with the musical score.

Peter Macon’s role as narrator made the show for me.  Since the story mostly consists of dramatic monologue, Macon’s role is central.  From his dress to his stature to his gate, Macon becomes Sonny’s brother from head to toe and feels the part with heart and soul, as if he really were in danger of losing a brother to the dark depths of heroine. In his third appearance with Word for Word, Peter Macon, who “has performed on Broadway, Lincoln Center, Manhattan Theatre Club as well as other prominent stages throughout the country including The Guthrie Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, The Shakespeare Theatre in Washington D.C.,” earned an M..F.A. from the Yale School of Drama, where he earned the Herchell Williams Award, and earned an Emmy in 2002.

In his debut performance with Word for Word, Da’Mon Vann brought the title character to life, with a sarcastic attitude that mixes lingering contempt with a slouching denial and childlike insecurity.  Also stellar were the performances of Mujahid Abdul-Rashid as Creole, Sonny’s band-mate, and Margarette Robinson as Mama.

The Score

Growing up with a stepfather who was a jazz musician, Margo Hall has imbued the blues and be-bop from an early age, and was particularly drawn to the role of music in the story.  After first considering casting actor and beat-boxer, Tommy Shepherd, as the character of Sonny, in order to bring the jazz out through the dialogue, she decided to approach San Francisco bassist and composer, Marcus Shelby, to write an original score for the production.  Unlike Sonny Stitts’ wailing Sonny’s Blues, Shelby’s score takes a softer, more understated angle, dreamily in the background at times, dynamically intermingling with the spoken words, and harmonizing with their psychological weight.  Even in the climactic final scene of the story, when Sonny is at the piano, and his brother is hearing his inner voice for the first time, the music continues to accompany the narration, letting Baldwin’s words themselves carry the score.  Throughout Shelby’s compositions, from trio to orchestra, from his orchestral compositions to his trio compositions, there is always the blues,  and his compositions for “Sonny’s Blues” bring is steeped in the sounds of early blues that I think Baldwin was picturing, probably listening to Bessie Smith or Milt Jackson, as he penned the blues-drenched masterpiece.

Marcus Shelby, one of the most prominent local jazz musicians in San Francisco, is a bassist, composer, arranger, bandleader, and teacher in San Francisco, balancing various trio performances and recordings with the Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra.  Shelby has produced seven albums with Noir Records featuring trio and orchestra, teaches music at San Francisco State University, and presenting his ideas on music and culture in community events, in Aril at the San Mateo Libraries.  I have greatly enjoyed his performances that I’ve seen with his trio at Jazz at Pearl’s or Café Claude, and with his Jazz Orchestra at the Fillmore Jazz Festival, at Yoshi’s, Bruno’s, his composing and arranging forever bringing out the flavors of his favorites, notably Duke Ellington, as well as his own voice, his own particular swing.  Shelby’s last two works with MSJO, Port Chicago (2006), and Bound for the Promise Land: Harriet Tubman (2007), have been pieces that respond to history, Port Chicago a remembrance of a 1944 explosion at a California naval base that took the lives of over 320 mostly African American men, and was later to reveal racial discrimination in the base as well as dangerous work conditions, and Bound for the Promise Land a tribute to the great American hero, Harriet Tubman’s work with the Underground Railroad and then with the Women’s Sufferage Movement.  

In Shelby’s words:

“The black sailors who lost their lives on July 17th, 1944 in a massive explosion at the Port Chicago Naval Weapon’s Base were true, if unwitting, American heroes. The explosion drew investigation, which revealed Jim Crow-like racial segregation in the naval forces, involving disadvantaged, dangerous, and ultimately deadly working conditions for black sailors.”

From Margo Hall’s effective adaptation with Word for Word, to Macon and Da’Mon’s as well as the rest of the cast, to Shelby’s individual score, Baldwin’s masterpiece of a story was brought to life tonight at the Lorainne Hansberry Theatre 

You Tube Videos

James Baldwin – on Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

James Baldwin – pt. 1 of 3