Into the ‘Fire’

Passage Theatre Company stages Charlayne Woodard’s autobiographical play.

By: Jillian Kalonick

"image"
Linda Kennedy stars in ‘Pretty Fire,’ at Mill Hill Playhouse in Trenton April 14-24.


   When playwright Charlayne Woodard was born, she weighed one pound, eight ounces — doctors didn’t expect her to live through the night. When she went home from the hospital 11 months later, a two-week-old sister was already there — "their little insurance policy in case I didn’t make it," Ms. Woodard writes in her one-woman show, Pretty Fire.
   The play, which won the Los Angeles Theatre Critics Award and the NAACP Theatre Award, tells the story of Ms. Woodard’s childhood, split between her parents’ home in Albany, N.Y., and her grandparents’ farm in Georgia. The five vignettes explore family, racism and Ms. Woodard’s beginnings as a performer.
   "It’s story theater — it has moments of flashback and being in the scene," says Linda Kennedy, who will play Charlayne’s character in Pretty Fire at Passage Theatre Company in Trenton April 14 to 24. "It’s not just talking to the audience — it’s both narrative- and character-based. I had been doing children’s storytelling for about 15 years, and I approached it with that. I don’t think of it as a one-person show as much as I think of it as living somebody’s story."
   In one scene, young Charlayne and her sister are watching television when their mother turns off the set and asks what her daughters want to be when they grow up. Charlayne says she wants to be Lassie — or Shirley Temple.
   "I want to live in a big, white, marble house with a huge, spiral staircase, right next to my happy, Negro butler!" Charlayne tells her mother. "All dressed up in tux and tails, and clean, white gloves! And together we will come tap dancing down that staircase…" Her sister Allie says she wants to be "the happy Negro maid."
   "Even though we didn’t take the same paths, there were many things I could connect to, especially in the Shirley Temple piece," says Ms. Kennedy. "That’s so much a part of me as well… It’s about defining self, when you turn on a television or a radio or open a magazine and you don’t see someone who looks like you. But Shirley Temple was a child, like me. We all tried to tap dance, we put those little patent leather shoes on and tried to tap dance down the sidewalk."
   Ms. Kennedy is director of education and community programs for St. Louis Black Repertory Company, where she has appeared in more than 40 productions. She performed Pretty Fire for Black Rep in 2004. Elizabeth Van Dyke will direct the Passage Theatre production.
   "Both women and men have said how much it makes you think of your own childhood, and how universal some of the stories are," says Ms. Kennedy. In one of the vignettes, the differences between Charlayne’s Albany home and her grandparents’ farm in the Jim Crow South are painfully clear. Not realizing the significance of a Klu Klux Klan cross-burning, Charlyane and her sister are in awe of the "pretty fire."
   Mostly, Charlayne’s recollections of the South focus on childhood wonders — playing in the red clay mud, fresh seafood from a cart and getting spoiled by her grandparents.
   "I didn’t go to the South until I was an adult, even though my mother’s family is from the South," says Ms. Kennedy, who is the third generation from her family to live in the same house in St. Louis. "The first time I saw it, it took me back to being 6, when you have that wide-eyed wonder and you’re not aware of all of the dangers that exist."
   Mostly the play focuses on the love of family and growing up amid racism, but not being stunted by it — young Charlyane describes Jim Crow as "this man down in Dixie my mother hated."
   "I see her outlook through the story she’s telling as being empowering and positive, keeping her on a solid foundation," says Ms. Kennedy. "There are so many things that are negative, that we can’t allow (young black women) to dwell on that. That’s what the play does to me. It shows there are positive black men and black women in your daily life. They may not be superstars but they’re superheroes in your life.
   "To have a good strong family base is so important," she continues. "I hope I’m that for my granddaughters. To be able to do this and be a grandmother and a great-grandmother is a blessing."
Pretty Fire will be staged by Passage Theatre Company at Mill Hill Playhouse, Front and Montgomery streets, Trenton, April 14-24. Performances: Thurs.-Fri. 8 p.m.; Sat. 2, 8 p.m.; Sun. 5 p.m. Tickets cost $28, $25 if purchased by April 8. For information, call (609) 392-0766. On the Web: www.passagetheatre.org