‘Recitatif,’ based on a Toni Morrison short story and to be performed at the Philadelphia Live Arts & Fringe Festival, explores the racial divide in a friendship.
By: Ilene Dube
A term often used for a rhythm-free vocal style of dialogue during opera, a recitative falls somewhere between song and speech. An archaic usage referred to the rhythms of a language.
Nobel Prize-winning author and Princeton University Professor Toni Morrison played off both meanings in a short story published in 1983 titled Recitatif. The tale begins during the civil rights era, when Twyla and Roberta, both 8, meet in an orphanage in the South. One is black, the other white, although the author never makes it clear which is which.
Roberta has been institutionalized because her mother is sick, and Twyla placed there because her mother "likes to dance all night." Through five separate encounters, the story follows their friendship through the years during their working lives, marriages, and reactions to busing and integration. The two characters have conflicting memories of a woman who was mistreated at the orphanage, and the story ends unresolved in a coffeeshop.
With Twyla narrating the tale, bringing the rhythms of the two lives together, it is, in a way, her recitative.
Ms. Morrison’s story was used as the springboard for a new play to be performed Sept. 13 to 15 at the Philadelphia Live Arts & Fringe Festival. Director Adrienne Mackey, who served as assistant director to Dan Rothenberg for the Pig Iron Theater Company’s Henry Meets Hell Halfway (performed on the Princeton University campus as well as the Fringe Festival in 2004), has never met Ms. Morrison. The story was given to her by Audrey Pernell in 2004, then a fellow theater student at Swarthmore College, who thought it would make an interesting theater piece.
Ms. Mackey received a New Edge Residency grant from the Community Education Center in West Philadelphia last year to create the new work. "They give you rehearsal space and a small stipend," says Ms. Mackey. "I applied with the idea that Audrey and Felicia (Leicht, another Swarthmore graduate) would (create the roles of the two characters)." The new Recitatif is [msu: set: ]set in Philadelphia.
"Philadelphia is a modern city that is divided," says Ms. Mackey. "It’s not segregated, but there is a kind of neighborhood division. It’s not a city that wants to mix." Recitatif is not an adaptation of Ms. Morrison’s story, but a recontextualization of the material, Ms. Mackey points out. One character is a dark-skinned Italian-American and the other a light-skinned African-American. There is no writing credit for this story; rather, the performers developed the story from their own experiences growing up in Philadelphia.
"It’s loosely autobiographical," says Ms. Mackey. "Less so factually, but emotionally it’s their own stories."
Recitatif was performed at the end of the New Edge Residency in spring, and then again at the Berkshire Fringe Festival in Massachusetts this summer where it was positively received. "We had sizable audiences, and they stayed afterward for the talk-back session, asking smart and interesting questions that showed us they were thinking about the kind of issues we’d hoped they would," says Ms. Mackey.
The production features original vocal scores and "psychophysical acting," according to the Fringe brochure. "The acting draws from many styles," says Ms. Mackey. Psychophysical acting means expressive movement is used to show feelings and emotional states (with roots in the Jerzy Grotowski Method). "It’s based on the idea of creating a language of gesture and movement. Dynamic movements become the raw material for staging the piece, and it’s very music heavy the soundscape is as important as the physical landscape."
The sound design for Recitatif is based on gospel, Italian opera, Italian pop and folk, soul, Christmas carols "and a cultural mix."
"The music is created through the characters’ personalities," says Ms. Mackey. "Mahalia Jackson and Pavorotti weave through to create a cohesive whole."
Ms. Mackey has worked with Ms. Pernell on a one-woman, semi-autobiographical, biracial piece, Hang Tough, Martina, while the two were students at Swarthmore. "She [msu: is: ]is a trained opera singer, and it’s about the journey of finding her original voice," says Ms. Mackey. Ms. Leicht has a more traditional background, having studied at the British Academy of Drama and Arts. The three women graduated from Swarthmore in 2004, and Recicitaf provides the first opportunity for them to work together since college.
At last year’s Fringe Festival, Ms. Mackey directed a one-woman show with Ms. Leicht, Like Ink and Paper, based on a Kahlil Gibran poem, and Ballad of Joe Hill, a musical about the union activist from the early 1900s who was executed for a murder he most likely never committed. That production brought out both sides of the controversial "hero."
"The union organizers maintain he was wrongly accused and was a martyr for the union cause," she says. "The other side is that he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and was made into a cause celebre he was heroicized after he was executed." Ballad was performed vaudeville style on a prison block at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia.
These days, Ms. Mackey finds she is closer to making her living exclusively in the theater. She teaches acting at Wolf Performing Arts Center in Philadelphia, as well as freelancing as a "simulated patient." Simulated, or standardized, patients are actors who perform as a real patient with symptoms and problems to help train doctors in medical school. "It helps train doctors in how to talk to patients, how to understand the personal dimensions," says Ms. Mackey, who found this line of work through fellow actors. "I had a double major in drama and chemistry, so I’m interested in science as well."
Recitatif will be performed at the Mum Puppettheatre, 115 Arch St., Phila., Sept. 13-15, 9:30 p.m. Tickets cost $15. Post-show discussion Sept. 13. Echo: Tribe of Fools, also directed by Adrienne Mackey, will be performed at The Fleisher Art Memorial Sanctuary, 719 Catharine St., Phila., Sept. 12-13, 8 p.m., Sept. 12-15, 10 p.m.; The Pig Iron Theatre Company will perform Isabella, a reworking of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, using human puppetry set in a hospital morgue. Ice Box Projects Space, 1400 N. American St., Phila., Aug. 31-Sept. 2, Sept. 6-Sept. 9, Sept. 11, 7 p.m.; Sept. 8, 15, 3 p.m. Tickets cost $20. The 11th annual festival runs Aug. 31-Sept. 15; (215) 413-1318; www.livearts-fringe.org.

