Spell 7

Written by Ntozake Shange

Directed by Timothy Benston

At Mather House

Through May 2

Ntozake Shange's Spell 7, written in 1980, is like Hollywood Shuffle without the comedy and without a plot. The Mather House production has some powerful moments and excellent performances, and its political message is compelling. But sometime around the middle of the second, and last act, the performance runs out of steam.

Director Timothy Benston's first success was in his transformation of the Mather House Dining Hall, which usually looks like an Alpine hunting lodge, into a sleek jukebox joint. There the play's nine characters--played by an all Black cast--hang out and discuss their woes as Black actors trying to make it big in show biz. By the play's end, the audience, along with the cast, is supposed to "be colored & love it."

The play begins with a lively monologue by Lou (Kerrington Osborne), a magician dressed in minstrel garb, in which he deftly parodies the degrading roles traditionally available for Black actors. While he speaks, the rest of the actors are also onstage wearing black masks with grotesque white mouths and eyes.

The first act moves along at a brisk pace and is much more intense than the second, which lags and looks under-rehearsed. The play chiefly consists of monologues, but their intensity is undermined by the actors in the background. They seem unsure of what to do when not speaking and occasionally lapse out of character and look around the theater.

Written in verse, Shange's dialogue is powerful but occasionally seems to confound the actors. How does one convey the script's unpunctuated sentences or uncapitalized words? Only Jaqueline Hayes (Lily) is undaunted by the complexity of the figurative language. She is human and funny throughout.

Additional problems, at least in the performance I saw, were caused by technical snafus. The music, for instance, was much too soft and occasionally stopped playing while the actors were still dancing.

Spell 7 tries to be too much. It not only wants to be political and poetic, but entertaining as well. That the Mather House production fails to be all three is not surprising. Director Benston & crew do succeed, though, in creating a compelling statement about the the latent racism that perpetuates stereotypes and keeps Black actors in condescending Black roles.