"black Cycle" "what If It Had Turned Up Heads"

Afro-Centric Theater
WCCC/Greenfield Center

Wayne County Community College's Greenfield Center (formerly the Rosary High School building) is an excellent auditorium for high school assemblies- spacious, clean and cavernous-but it's a disaster for black theater. The 1,000 seats engulfed the small (15 - to 75-patron) audiences which attended the two plays, Black Cycle and What If It Turned Up Heads, presented four weekends in a row by the Afro-Centric Theater.
The actors' voices bounced off seats and walls, ricocheting around the room and creating an echo-chamber effect. The 15 foot divide that separated the audience from the stage (it looked like it might provide a rock group good protection from its adoring fans) made theatrical communication akin to holding a conversation across a busy intersection. Members of the audience lost touch with the players, and with each other as well.
It's really a shame, because both works had merit in terms of above-average scripts, strong themes, and strong language. Black Cycle deals with the problems of black families and the loving, bitter, almost compulsive attempts by two black women to raise their children in face of the handicaps of modern ghetto life. The odds are overwhelmingly against these mothers- their struggle is real, honest, and relentless.
What If It Had Come Up Heads is a tragi-comedy of the lumpen-proletariat: the wino, the sexually-used and -assaulted women, the alcoholic bootlegger, and their assorted hangers-on. This is a tough script and, the night I saw it, the actors and director choked on it. It required a lot of subtlety and direction, but if the director asked that of the actors, they sure couldn't deliver. They went out of control about five minutes into the play, and the director never got it back after that.
Even in Cycle, the blocking needed tightening. The_ actors moved sloppily around the stage, seeming unable to handle the huge area they had to deal with. Despite this handicap, there were a lot of good points to the production, particularly in the work of Diane Mallete and Dy Anne Scott, playing the lead sisters in Black Cycle and doing it to death.
On the other hand, the best I can say about Heads is that it should be recast with new actors and maybe a different director. It became a burlesk show, and a bad one at that, in the hands of its cast. The actors need to start all over again-with sensitivity sessions and poetry recitation-probably they should enroll in the drama classes starting this fall at the Northwest Activities Center, and get their business together.
Also, the sets were pretty good for both plays, and Ibn Pori of the Associated Black Publishers staged a line display of books and records in the lobby, where Djenaba served the best bread-cake I've had in a long time!
Longer runs would help the overall production of both plays, but how long can you rent a 1,000seat theater for a dozen paying customers? The producer has spoken of taking these works to Ocie's Lounge on Fenkell for extended engagements, and I hope he does. They really belong there, financially and artistically.
I saw the Afro-Centric Theater's last product on, The Fabulous Miss Marie, at the Langston Hughes Theater, and they did excellent work. Overall, they 've got a good group-creatively and politically- and though I wasn't as impressed with this production as I was with their last one, I nevertheless encourage the community to continue (and increase) its support of this energetic acting group.

-David Rambeau

Kulchur welcomes David Rambeau, a founding member of Project BAIT (Black Awareness in TV and Radio)- which currently produces regular programs on WKBDTV (Channel 50) and WDET-FM and a director of the original Concept East Theatre in Detroit.