TODAY

Sunday, January 27, 2008
A+E, Theater

Sing it again

7 Stages’ ‘Song for Coretta’ fades too soon

By Bert Osborne

No play can be that bad when your biggest complaint is there should be more of it. In fact, the 80-minute “A Song for Coretta” is a very good play by the Atlanta-based Pearl Cleage (“Flyin’ West”), her first in a decade. Set outside Ebenezer Baptist Church in February 2006, the eloquent drama follows a line of five black women, each with her own reason for wanting to pay her respects to the late Coretta Scott King. After a one-weekend-only premiere in early ’07 at Spelman College, the play is now getting a richly deserved professional production at 7 Stages (where it’s especially invigorating to see that a little naturalistic drama never hurt anyone).
 
Crystal Dickinson is back to direct the show, along with three of her original cast. The splendid Andrea Frye (“Intimate Apparel”) plays the dignified elder stateswoman of the group, the only one who ever met Mrs. King (“twice,” she smiles) or experienced the Civil Rights movement firsthand (marking her childhood birthdays by the bus boycotts). Spelman students Brynn Tucker and DeAndrea Crawford also reprise their respective roles as the young aspiring National Public Radio reporter who’s interviewing them and as a tough teen who’s already on her second unplanned pregnancy.
 
At the forefront of the friction is a familiar generation gap separating the Frye and Crawford characters. While one laments “what we used to be as a community of people ... and what we’ve become,” the other’s idea of a “freedom song” is a rap tune about a pimp. Once Cleage introduces emblems of Hurricane Katrina (a displaced artist) and the war in Iraq (an Army medic), you can almost picture her checklist of socially relevant issues. That in itself isn’t the problem—because what she has to say is beautifully written and expressed by the cast—so much as the sense of a self-imposed time limit in which to hastily pile it all on.
 
Seeing the Spelman show and hearing about 7 Stages’ remount, I’d hoped that Cleage would take some time and give it to these women—provide some breathing room to flesh them out as individuals, to strengthen the connective tissue between them, to bring any closure to the older woman/younger girl conflict. In the end, perhaps the ultimate testament to the playwright is that we care enough about her creations to want to know them better and spend longer with them.
 
The testament to these actresses is that they aren’t only personifying this or that hot-button topic. Of the additions to the ensemble, Bobbi Lynne Scott (“Come on in My Kitchen”) captures the soldier’s angry frustration more effectively than her haunted grief, but the ever-radiant Marguerite Hannah (“Waiting to be Invited”) wraps it up and takes it away as the free-spirited artist. In her loveliest moment, about holding a mirror to life, there’s no clearer example of how the humanity in Cleage’s characters, “this little light” of theirs, shines through.