Hemorrhaging from a host of self-inflicted wounds, Charlotte Repertory
Theatre is one company that desperately needs a break. Yet at the finest hour
of their current season, the house at last Saturday night’s performance of The
Exonerated wasn’t sold out.
This production reminds us what Rep can be at its best, bringing us a compelling,
provocative work less than two years after its celebrated Off-Broadway run.
The cast, a mix of local and out-of-town stalwarts, is tighter and better-rehearsed
than the New York production, which featured a revolving set of celebs reading
the roles.
Topping off Saturday night’s sterling effort, Rep welcomed a true-life exoneree to Booth Playhouse, former police detective Jeffrey Scott Hornoff, who served more than six years of a life sentence for a crime he didn’t commit. Upstaging the Off-Broadway show yet again.
So why the empty seats? Disaffection with the Rep and its overall 2004-05 lineup is probably the prime cause. Failure to adequately publicize Hornoff’s one-night stand — or anticipate the electricity he would create — was another blunder. But the unlucky timing couldn’t have helped.
Just eight days before Rep’s opening, Court TV premiered a star-studded film version of the Drama Desk Award winner. If that weren’t enough, an officer of the National District Attorneys Association raised questions about the veracity of Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen’s script. Joshua Marquis, a county DA in Oregon, made a minor splash on cable, facing off against Barry Scheck on MSNBC and Court TV on successive days.
Adjudicating the flap in last week’s Chicago Reader, Michael Miner confirms that there’s a fine distinction between legal exoneration and accepting the “Alford plea” in exchange for release from prison. Two of the six Exonerated protagonists, Sonia “Sunny” Jacobs and Kerry Max Cook, took this route. Essentially they pleaded no contest to their murder charges without admitting guilt — and without tarnishing their prosecutors’ conviction records.
Scheck vociferously denounced the Alford plea as a cynical face-saving device, but the most devastating chink in the Blank-Jensen armor may have come to light after Marquis’s abortive talk show crusade. Turns out that Robert Earl Hayes, exonerated for the 1990 murder of a female groom at a Florida racetrack, pleaded guilty to manslaughter last November — of a female groom at a New York racetrack in 1987.
So-o-o-o-o… at the very least, Rep’s “judge for yourself” slogan now means that we begin our quest for the truth at Booth Playhouse — supplementing that intimate experience with some outside reading.
Directing for the second time at Rep this season, Dave Mowers sets up his players with the same stark simplicity that characterized the New York staging. All of them remain seated throughout the performance behind lecterns and playscripts. Eric Winkenwerder’s lighting design, relying heavily on spotlights, effectively rivets our attention on the actors. So effectively that I didn’t catch any of the costume changes that were going on at the corners of the stage.
That adds a little of the extra spice you’ll find in Rep’s Exonerated. Mowers also demands more acting (and a lot less reading) from his actors than I saw at 45 Bleecker Street in 2002. Carl McIntyre’s portrait of Kerry Cook and George Gray’s rendition of Gary Gauger had noticeably more rustic flavor.
McIntyre dug into Cook so deeply that I remain convinced he did the right thing by accepting a deal before DNA testing conclusively proved his innocence. Branded a homosexual by an unscrupulous prosecutor, hideously scarred by his fellow prisoners, Cook can be excused for lunging at a chance for freedom after 22 years of unspeakable hell. That some small-time DA can’t concede his innocence speaks volumes. Gray’s take on Gauger is likewise useful in pointing up how he was coerced into playing the patsy.
A couple of apt reality checks: All of the Death Row vets except one are men, and three of the six liberated prisoners are black. Pam Galle brings all of her considerable luminosity to Sunny even as we’re beginning to learn that the flower-child innocence of her self-portrait is largely myth. One of Galle’s best moments comes when she insouciantly informs us that she was left to fester on Death Row for 16 years after her cohort renounced his plea-bargained testimony. A minute later, she stops the show by asking us to imagine a chunk that size taken out of our lives. Chilling.
All four of the black performers are making their Rep debuts. The guys are all impressive — and nicely individualized. As our de facto poet-narrator Delbert Tibbs, Evander Duck often performs in the chanting fashion of the poetry slam circuit, achieving a wry philosophical distance telling his own story. Playing the lapsed man of God, Paul Garrett audaciously breaks away from the reading stage conventions observed by the other actors, deteriorating suddenly before our eyes as David Keaton. Believe me, it works.
Guiesseppe Jones is the most humdrum and domesticated of the convicted blacks as Robert Hayes. While Jones distinguishes himself with his low-key portrayal, Gina Daniels doesn’t get a chance to show much as his loyal wife Georgia.
On the other hand, Carver Johns and Martin Thompson are perhaps encouraged to show too much, playing all the heavies. Their surreptitious costume changes are enjoyable, but most of their hayseeds, bullying cops, underhanded prosecutors and sleazoid snitches are taken to the point of caricature — particularly where Mowers sees fit to lighten the evening with a Southern-fried stereotype.
If you’re hearing the harrowing stories of The Exonerated for the first time, you’ll readily empathize with Mowers’ malice toward their tormentors. After the suffering they inflicted, it’s a pitifully small retribution.
Two big-name keyboard virtuosi sat center stage at Belk Theater last week, and neither one disappointed. Navah Perlman was featured with the Prague Symphony, attacking Chopin’s Piano Concerto #2 with surprising muscularity. If her initial onslaught set off misgivings that Izhak’s daughter might be a tad heavy-handed, those misgivings were dispelled in the lyrical passages of the opening maestoso and ensuing larghetto.The Czechs mated well with Perlman under Rastislav Stur’s baton and did nicely on Beethoven’s “Leonore Overture 3.0.” But Dvorak’s Symphony #6 was a milky gruel except for the vibrant Slavonic dance in the third movement. All in all, with Cantus and St. Petersburg Ballet looming straight ahead, Carolinas Concert Association’s jubilee season is turning out to be among their best.
Later in the week, Jean-Yves Thibaudet was decked out in a red serge jacket, signing CDs in the lobby after his conquest of the Ravel Piano Concerto in G with the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra. Unfortunately, we had to endure a curiously lackadaisical trudge through Schubert’s Symphony #9 after intermission. Maestro Christof Perick had the CSO polished to a fine sheen, but the work didn’t sound as “Great” as it did nine years ago under Peter McCoppin.
With so much excitement at the Belk and the Booth, I was only able to catch the first night of the three-day North Carolina Dance Festival at the Afro-Am Cultural Center. The fare was all topnotch, but this wasn’t the best night to sample groups from outside Charlotte : or new stuff from Martha Connerton/Kinetic Works, the host company.Best of the new pieces was Nelson Reyes’ “Largo Tempo,” a wacky solo that saw a tuxedoed Reyes lose his sleeves, his jacket, his pants legs and his dignity amid a hodgepodge of classical music. Noel Reiss, a UNC-Charlotte choreographer, presented “Upper Hand,” sporting fine chemistry — and lots of attitude — from Tai Dorn partnered with Jeremy Foyle. If you hadn’t seen its premiere back in August, Connerton’s “Vox 2” was a radiant way to end the program.
Give the crown to Greensboro for the best Black History Month celebration of 2005. Tuesday of last week, I drove up I-85 to see Triad Stage’s presentation of Gloria Bond Clunie’s North Star, a drama that takes place in a small North Carolina town after the Greensboro Four have sparked the sit-in demonstrations that swept the South in 1960.So there I am on South Elm Street about half an hour before the show begins. Less than a block past the Triad Stage storefront, I turn right to find a parking spot — on E. February One Place! Just 6-1/2 hours earlier, the reason for that street name had been vividly commemorated.
Exactly 45 years after those four students from NCA&T sat down at the Woolworth’s lunch counter on South Elm and politely ordered coffee, the restored 5&10 façade had been unveiled in a noontime ceremony. It’s a big step toward a complete restoration that will culminate with the official opening of the International Civil Rights Center & Museum on July 25.
That will be the 45th anniversary of the victorious afternoon when FW Woolworth’s caved in and, without advance publicity, agreed to serve three black men sitting at their lunch counter.
Clunie’s drama, lovingly staged by Triad Stage, transcends mere history lesson. At a grassroots level, North Star diligently chronicles the preparation that went into staging the sit-ins. We’re reminded that non-violent protest requires more than simple courage. This triumph of the human spirit over insidious Jim Crow oppression took a special kind of discipline and zeal.
Reaching the climactic moment when a divided family unites and launches the sit-in, we’re treated to an almost religious spectacle. As the lunch counter emerges from the wings and into the Triad Stage spotlight, the authenticity is uncanny.
As it should be. The five Woolworth’s stools used to build that counter are
on loan from the Museum — through this coming Sunday.
This article appears in Feb 9-15, 2005.
