Unfinished business
Yellowman and Memphis explore America's racial legacy.

By Robert Avila

IN THE BAY Area premiere of Dael Orlandersmith's involving and wrenching Yellowman, a production of the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in association with the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, two characters from the Gullah-Geechee region of South Carolina recount the story of their doomed romance. Alma (Deidre N. Henry), a dark-skinned African American woman, and Eugene (Clark Jackson), a light-skinned, or high-yellow, African American man, talk mainly to the audience in vigorous bursts of biographical detail and confession. Channeling parents and friends, they relate the story of a lifelong friendship that blossomed into love only to run up against the taboos of an intraracial pecking order.

Racism in the African American community, if underexamined, is not an entirely new theme, but Orlandersmith sets the psychological impact of it in so intimate a story and mode of presentation that the virulence of the disease comes across in the starkest terms. At the same time, the play's single act, on a bare stage framed only by a watercolor cloudscape, creates a thoroughly literary portrait with taut and well-crafted dialogue. Yellowman exudes a Southern gothic quality in its mixture of tragic family legacies and a pervading sense of doom and decay – a stiflingly moribund social order that the play juxtaposes (a bit too complacently) with the churning anonymity of New York City, ever alive to the potential for reinventing oneself. (The missing character, the unseen and unspoken context of white racism, remains a palpable presence all the same.)

Despite a grim assessment of racism in the United States, the story nurses a faith in transgression. In the volatile and dangerous mixture of race and class looms the possibility of remaking the self – and by extension the community – by rescuing it, redefining it, and moving it forward. The flip side of Alma's self-consciousness about her appearance is Eugene's deep-seated sexual attraction to her large, dark-skinned body. Society, like art, advances by breaking rules, and color lines, no matter where they're drawn, are made to be crossed.

Crossroads

A new musical about the birthplace of rock 'n' roll in the 1950s, Memphis converts the dead-end South of Yellowman into ground zero for a sea change in race relations using the city's ubiquitous natural resource: music. TheatreWorks and North Shore Music Theatre's joint world premiere of Memphis, which turns on a certain mythic version of the origins of rock 'n' roll, literally turns like a 45 rpm single on scenic designer Bill Stabile's colorful and ever changing stage. It features a respectable batch of songs largely contributed by Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan, who blends driving blues, rousing gospel, early rock 'n' roll, raunchy R&B, and at least one hillbilly spoof – delivered with smooth precision.

But if rock 'n' roll's emergence signaled the rebellion of a younger generation against the rules and mores of postwar America, it was rooted in a racial dynamic that Memphis makes central to its story. Loosely based on the career of "Daddy-O" Dewey Phillips, the wild and lightning-tongued Memphis DJ who pioneered rock 'n' roll programming and the American Bandstand-style TV format, Joe DiPietro's competent if predictable book follows the rise and fall of a scrappy, redneck music lover named Huey Calhoun (Chad Kimball). Huey's white face haunts the bars of Beale Street, the heart of black West Memphis, where black blues and R&B musicians and their black audiences were wont to rock with abandon. Making friends and sparking a romance with a beautiful singer named Felicia (the impressive Montego Glover), he begins promoting their music to white Memphis, creating a new community out of a younger generation brought together across the color line by an irresistible backbeat. On Rock Shop blacks and whites dance together, sing for one another, and admire one another as a single community of rock 'n' rollers. Even the inevitable white backlash doesn't have the power to turn back the clock once things have taken a new course.

TV is not only a conduit for the new generation's new community, however – it's also the basis of an industry with a will and agenda of its own (summed up in the song "Dick Clark," a scathing attack on the soulless music industry's public face) and threatened by the development of the very community responsible for its meal ticket. This comes across most succinctly and provocatively in the on-air interracial kiss between Felicia and Huey. The kiss (which carries a whole heap of historical baggage the play completely ignores) is only partly a fiction too. It has nothing to do with Phillips but points to his Northern counterpart, Cleveland DJ Alan Freed, whose own rock 'n' roll TV show was canceled in 1957 after it aired an African American artist dancing with a white woman. At a time when African American artists hold unprecedented sway over popular music, such images, mixing fantasy and truth, hold some major and sometimes wonderful ironies. The corporate behemoth known as the music industry may sometimes look like it has squeezed the rebel soul out of the cultural sphere altogether, but every now and then some transgression, even done cynically in the name of self-promotion but broadcast "live" over America's TV sets, reminds us that sex and race have an unfinished agenda of their own.

'Yellowman' runs through March 7. Tues. and Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m. (also Sat/14, Feb. 19, 28, and March 4, 2 p.m.); Wed. and Sun., 7 p.m. (also Sun., 2 p.m.), Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison, Berk. $10-$55. (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. 'Memphis' runs Wed/11-Sat/14, 8 p.m. (also Sat/14, 2 p.m.); Sun/15, 2 and 7 p.m., Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro, Mountain View. $20-$48. (650) 903-6000, www.theatreworks.org.