Voices in the ether

W. Allen Taylor finds his father on the radio in Walkin' Talkin' Bill Hawkins

By Robert Avila

a&eletters@sfbg.com

The United States made a unique discovery in the economic boom years following World War II: the black consumer. It was then, and for the first time, that reaching an African American audience with cash to spend became a priority for American business. The effort played a determining role in the rise of the country's first black DJs and the highly influential flowering of black radio. The flip side of that record, of course, was the simultaneous self-discovery, or reimagining, of the African American community itself.

This essential social and musical history forms the background to an intimate, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes anguished personal tale in writer-performer W. Allen Taylor's Walkin' Talkin' Bill Hawkins, his one-man play now receiving its world premiere at the Marsh's Berkeley theater. For just as the black community of 1940s Cleveland discovered itself, in part, through the disembodied personality and style of Bill Hawkins, the city's first black DJ, a generation later, in the mid-1970s, Taylor began a personal journey of self-discovery by finding his own voice, otherwise known as "Allen Taylor and the AT Thang," over the airwaves of his Ohio college radio station. But from there the similarity grows both stranger and more complex, as his lifelong questions to his reticent mother regarding his absent father's identity finally yield the figure of the already married Hawkins, by then just recently passed away. With that painful dual moment of recovery and loss, Taylor and Walkin' enter into a kind of dialogue with that same Bill Hawkins (now fully detached from any earthly quarter), approaching the shadowy figure behind the radio personality through a common medium, a common love of music, and an extended family of relationships that reach into an era and community shaped by something as insubstantial yet definitive as a voice on the air.

As if to illustrate the real-world significance of things intangible, pride of place in Walter Holden's split-level set goes to a weighty solid box of a desk with a silver forties-era microphone planted on top. Projected on the wall behind it, the purple halo of a doctored Capitol record label looms like a blue moon, announcing the show's title and act. Occupying this perch is Allen's and the play's alter ego, a DJ called "The Kid." Meanwhile, an excellent mix of period music (the well-measured sound design is by Dustin Toshiyuki) bridges the hit records of the 1940s and 1970s, where Louis Jordan meets James Brown. Far from gratuitous or merely mood-setting, the play's musical foundation naturally plays a strong thematic role, joining father and son in a way that acts as a medium of confrontation, forgiveness, and the mutual imparting of generational expertise and private knowledge.

It's the frank and ruminating personal tale that strikes the most affecting and involving note here, but the social setting remains deeply intertwined with the play's dramatic pitch and complex irony. After all, Walkin' Talkin' Bill Hawkins, as audiences knew him, was a palpable presence in the lives of countless strangers even as he remained a question mark to his own child ("He gave us a feeling of unity," one fan recalls. "He was like family"), whatever the market forces working on the community for their own ends. At the same time, that Taylor would himself follow unwittingly in his father's footsteps as he entered college (still not knowing the older man's identity) suggests a kind of weird, attenuated, and very modern form of patrimony coming from multiple directions at once. It's a relationship the play exploits, as at key moments Allen addresses his father directly (invariably as "Daddy-O") in the guise of The Kid, who himself exists in a space somewhere between autobiography and fantasy, an imaginary realm made necessary by the death of his father but also possible by the real extracorporeal web of forces stitching together families, communities, consumers, and markets in an ambiguous network of relationships and identities. (The compounding of meanings is wryly suggested by Holden's lighting design, which bathes the play's alter ego, wearing sunglasses and a hat, in a bright, golden spotlight. The Kid is too much in the sun, as DJ Hamlet might say.)

Walkin' Talkin' Bill Hawkins remains an uneven piece. Workshopped several times (with original direction by Ellen Sebastian Chang), its debut has many intriguing and compelling aspects skillfully staged by director Gloria Weinstock (including a gently haunting, comic yet mournful movement Allen mimes once or twice, drawn from his childhood anecdote about his uncle's slaughtering of a pet turkey – "that headless turkey gave me nightmares for a long time"). Still, as an evolving piece drawn out of a lifelong journey, one suspects Walkin' still has places to go, at least in the mechanics of its staging. Some scenes and dialogue can feel either incomplete or poorly integrated, for instance, and others suffer from a choppiness that comes especially from the occasional back-and-forth between characters and despite generally sharp work by Taylor (an accomplished actor and a professor of drama at College of Marin). After a slightly awkward hanging note at the end of the first act, the pacing and overall cohesion of the piece improve in the second. Here Taylor's characterizations are especially solid, and his interlocutors (several friends and acquaintances from his father's past as well as Allen's mother) hold forth uninterruptedly on Bill Hawkins with a convincing mix of love, nostalgia, and regret – scenes made all the more poignant for inevitably being the expression, at the same time, of a son's vicarious entry into the longed-for life and world of a missing father.

WALKIN' TALKIN' BILL HAWKINS Through Jan. 28, Thurs.-Sat., 7 p.m. The Marsh Berkeley 2118 Allston Way, Berk. $5-$22 (415) 826-5750 for info; (800) 838-3006 for tickets www.themarsh.org