|
Ayodele Nzinga
Directs
Gem of the Ocean by August Wilson
In West Oakland with the Lower Bottom Playaz
This weekend
[began] a first for the
Prescott-Joseph Center’s theater troupe, the Lower
Bottom Playaz, when they perform
August Wilson’s
Gem of the Ocean in its backyard theater at 920
Peralta St. in Oakland.
Ayodele Nzinga, theater director and dramaturge for
the center, said this week’s production of
Gem of the Ocean is the first play she felt no
need to adapt to make the story relevant for her West
Oakland community. She said she is excited about this
production.
“Wilson, the North American Shakespeare, summed up the
African-American experience,”
Nzinga
said. “It all still happens, it’s still relevant, that’s
why it doesn’t get changed by a group known for
adaptation.”
Gem of the Ocean takes place in 1904 Pittsburgh.
Nzinga said it
could be Oakland, it could happen anywhere. The main
character is trying to live his life after emancipation,
but finds he’s still on the outside forced to continue
to live with racism.
Nzinga
said they didn’t change a single line because the story
so “richly embodies a message and inspiration.”
“West Oakland is every urban area, anywhere,” she said.
“This story can take place wherever people live with
uneven resources and lack of access to education, jobs
and safety.”
The Playaz received rights to perform the play just 30
days ago, rehearsals were held every week night and all
day Saturday. Most of the performers work during the
day. Nzinga both directs and plays the part of Ester.
“Most artists have to do something else to survive,
“said
Nzinga, “I feel blessed because everything I do has
to do with art.”
Another first for the Playaz has been performing
Shakespeare in West Oakland for 10 years.
Nzinga
said the Prescott-Joseph Center had a vision of
performing Shakespeare; in 2001 the center built the
outdoor theater in its backyard with seating for 100.
“I figured the reason most people didn’t enjoy
Shakespeare like I did was because there wasn’t a frame
of reference, people didn’t relate to the European
stories of civil discontent,"
Nzinga said.
When she adapts Shakespeare,
Nzinga
said she keeps the plot, but changes the location to
West Oakland, specifically 920 Peralta. She changes
characters into rappers, a young mayoral candidate or a
father just out of prison. She wants the audience and
actors to see themselves and their situations in the
timeless stories of unrest.
Nzinga
holds auditions each year and said she’s trained the
majority of actors of color who have assisted through
the years. Children are included whenever possible and
some have grown up with the Lower Bottom Playaz, which
has created a multi-generational theater. She also works
within the West Oakland school system teaching writing
and performance.
Nzinga
said she believes that teaching children how to act on
stage gives them discipline, literacy skills and helps
them know “how to act in life.”
Nzinga
wants people to see this performance for many reasons.
“You have to know
where it is in West Oakland, people have to come here.
It’s a good place, when you walk in the backyard; you’re
in a different world, a divine theater space.”
Source:
Oakland Local
* * * * *
|
Gem of the World
By August Wilson
Set in 1904, 285 year-old
Aunt Esther welcomes two strangers into her
home. Solly Two Kings, a former Union
Army-man who was born into slavery; and
Citizen Barlow, a young man in search for
redemption. Aunt Esther guides Citizen
through a spiritual journey to the mythical
City of Bones aboard the legendary slave
ship, Gem of the Ocean. Meanwhile, chaos
ensues in the real world where Solly is
wrongfully accused of a crime and gets shot
as a result. Come to our performance to find
out how this magnificent story unravels.
No one except perhaps
Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams has
aimed so high and achieved so much in the
American theater.—John
Lahr, The New Yorker
A
swelling battle hymn of transporting beauty.
Theatergoers who have followed August
Wilson’s career will find in Gem a
touchstone for everything else he has
written.”—Ben
Brantley, The New York Times |
 |
Wilson’s juiciest
material. The play holds the stage and its characters
hammer home, strongly, the notion of newfound freedom.—Michael
Phillips, Chicago Tribune
* * * * *
August
Wilson’s
Gem of the Ocean
Directed by
Ayodele “WordSlanger” Nzinga
October 8 - 17,
2010
Friday & Saturday
at 7:30 p.m.
Sunday Matinee at
2:00 p.m.
Admission:
Table with Amenities - $20
General Admission - $15
Group Rates Available
For general information call Erika
at 510-835-8683 or e-mail
wordslanger@gmail.com
Source:
PrescottJoseph
* * * * *
WordSlanger@Black World Theater
* * * * *
Ayodele Nzinga is a dramatist,
arts lecturer and performance poet living in the San
Francisco Bay Area. She is the Artistic Director of The
Lower Bottom Playaz and The Sister Thea Bowman Memorial
Theater in West Oakland. She is a force to be reckoned
with on the West Coast spoken word circuit. Well known
for her take no prisoners style. As the WordSlanger she
is loved by vets and admired by young poets. She is
affiliated with Marvin X’s Recovery Theater. She holds
an MA and an MFA in Writing and Consciousness. She is
currently a candidate for PhD at the California
Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco CA.
* *
* * *
 |
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
* *
* * *
|
Ratification
The People Debate the Constitution,
1787-1788
By Pauline Maier
A notable historian
of the early republic, Maier devoted a
decade to studying the immense
documentation of the ratification of the
Constitution. Scholars might approach
her book’s footnotes first, but history
fans who delve into her narrative will
meet delegates to the state conventions
whom most history books, absorbed with
the Founders, have relegated to
obscurity. Yet, prominent in their local
counties and towns, they influenced a
convention’s decision to accept or
reject the Constitution. Their
biographies and democratic credentials
emerge in Maier’s accounts of their
elections to a convention, the political
attitudes they carried to the conclave,
and their declamations from the floor.
The latter expressed opponents’
objections to provisions of the
Constitution, some of which seem
anachronistic (election regulation
raised hackles) and some of which are
thoroughly contemporary (the power to
tax individuals directly). Ripostes from
proponents, the Federalists, animate the
great detail Maier provides, as does her
recounting how one state convention’s
verdict affected another’s. Displaying
the grudging grassroots blessing the
Constitution originally received, Maier
eruditely yet accessibly revives a
neglected but critical passage in
American history.—Booklist |
 |
* *
* * *
posted 10 October 2010
|
