Growing up
A pair of solo performances explore hard-nosed pleasures and excruciating pain.

By Robert Avila

LACKAWANNA, N .Y., in the 1950s was a boomtown for African American migrants from points south. World War II first drew men and women to jobs in and around the nation's ports and steel mills, but the postwar economy kept the opportunities, and the migrants, coming. Into this shifting world of new possibilities, new relationships, and new disappointments, with its nightclubs and its pulsing social life echoed in city blues and jazz, Tony Award-winning actor Ruben Santiago-Hudson grew up under the wing of a surrogate mother, boardinghouse proprietor Rachel "Nanny" Crosby, the saintlike hero of his celebrated solo show, Lackawanna Blues, currently making its West Coast debut at the American Conservatory Theater.

The set, appropriately spare, features few props beyond an oversize picture frame, hanging in Myung Hee Cho and James Vermeulen's spectral blue atmosphere, anticipating a succession of colorful portraits. Off to one side of the stage, the accomplished blues musician Bill Sims Jr. sits hunched over his acoustic guitar, under a broad-rimmed hat, an integral part of the proceedings – more aptly described as a duet with Santiago-Hudson – offering color, light, rhythm, counterpoint, a broad range of tones, and felicitous punctuation. Their conversation turns wholly musical when twice Santiago-Hudson blazes into a rhapsodic harmonica solo. On this practically bare stage, these two provide all the setting the show needs.

The sharp and personable Santiago-Hudson keeps himself largely on the sidelines of his reminiscences, giving center stage to his beloved guardian and about 20 deftly drawn characters from the community of drifters and strays at 32 Wasson Avenue, all of whom share a deep admiration for the kindhearted but indomitable Nanny. Director Loretta Greco helps ensure they all come through seamlessly, with impeccable timing, subtle emotion, and good humor. If the boy Ruben is only fleetingly present, Santiago-Hudson the performer consistently wows his audience with his technique and charm.

One might find the portrait of Nanny overly idealized, even bordering on hagiography, if it weren't for an authoritative element of chaos permeating the environment in which young Ruben grew up. For all the humanity in Santiago-Hudson's stories, they exhibit a keen awareness of, and contact with, the darkest human traits. Selfless and patient Nanny is herself not entirely immune to the violence around her. She convincingly threatens it in defending Ruben against his "Uncle Bill," her husband; later she confesses to having once been as violent and undisciplined as a wife-beating boxer she's forced to confront. And in the story of a one-armed man we have a tangible connection to the violence of a white-supremacist world beyond. The role of violence is complex here, but it is at least in part symbol and symptom of the great strain endured in a period of historic transition, part of the larger tangle of hope and despair registered in the blues – that "laughing to keep from crying," as Langston Hughes put it – in which a sheltering hand like Nanny's appears all the more miraculous.

Inside and out

On a different order of theatrical magnitude, Joe Loya's The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell conjures up another childhood blues tale that compels by the sheer force of its authenticity. Loya, known to feds tracking his notable bank robbery career in the 1980s as "the Beirut Bandit," hails from a Mexican American family in East Los Angeles. After his mother died when he was nine, his father, a born-again Baptist, began to tyrannize Loya and his brother with a physically brutal authoritarianism that drove Loya, a sensitive and charismatic child, to act out publicly in a life of crime, a complex mixture of rage and ambition. While in prison he began a correspondence with author Richard Rodriguez. Paroled in 1996, Loya has since embarked on a promising writing career.

Where Lackawanna Blues is smooth and professional, Loya's solo turn is bumpy and rough-edged. For all his charm, Loya is not an actor and lacks the physical discipline demanded of one. Director Karen Amano compensates with a modestly hip theatrical veneer, including visual punctuations on a backstage screen and musical transitions using Loya's favored rock tracks from the '80s. Designed to avoid too static a presentation and to keep Loya focused and well paced, the effect can also be jarring at times.

But the stories – robbing his first bank; trying to kill his father; his first day in prison; his early bid for respect by mercilessly beating a fellow inmate; the inmate who turns out to have known his mother; and of course Heavy D, the severely obese prisoner who literally grew too fat to house – add up to, among other things, an enthralling and sobering look at families, natural and surrogate. If on opening night Loya still wore his stage directions uncomfortably, he soon relaxed into a natural gift for storytelling and brought to the fore a personality that, at moments, easily outgrew the stage.

'Lackawanna Blues' runs through Dec. 1. Wed/13-Fri/15, Nov. 19-23, 26, and 29-30, 8 p.m. (also Wed/13, Nov. 23, and 30, 2 p.m.; Nov. 27, 2 and 7 p.m.; Sun/17, Nov. 24, and Dec. 1, 2 p.m.), Geary Theater, 415 Geary, S.F. $11-$49. (415) 749-2228. 'The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell' runs through Nov. 24. Thurs.-Sun., 8 p.m., Thick House, 1695 18th St., S.F. $15-$25 (sliding scale). (415) 401-8081.