Psalmayene 24 and Jabari Exum in Dear Mapel — Photo: Chris Banks
A heartfelt ode to fathers and sons, finding your voice, and growing up hip-hop, Psalmayene 24’s epistolary drama Dear Mapel (★★★★☆) also profoundly honors the lost art of letter-writing. That distinctly direct and intimate mode of expressing what’s most deeply felt, and saying what often can’t be spoken, serves as Psalm’s chosen means of addressing the father he barely knew.
Via letters to Mapel, the award-winning performer and playwright vividly evokes his own coming-of-age enriched by art and music, while examining the main thing, or person, that went missing.
For this world premiere production, director and production designer Natsu Onoda Power engulfs Mosaic’s Sprenger Theatre stage in a sweeping deluge of paper missives. Dozens more balled-up sheets of paper litter the floor, stray thoughts rejected or reconsidered.
The setting suggests a flood of stories, emotions, unaired grievances, and unshared joys, more than could be contained in a thousand letters, or however many it might take for the writer to feel some sense of closure.
The calm center of the storm at his writing desk, Psalm admits that closure remains elusive. But, as he quotes his Jamaican granddad, “nothing beats a failure but a try.”
So the show — which opens with Psalm’s beautifully written “I Am” poem introducing himself as an “incorrigible, nonconformist Jamerican…fly-ass motherfucker” — constitutes a powerful attempt to reach someone who can no longer respond. Though perhaps Mapel, as much as the audience, can still somehow receive the message.
That metal writing desk, the only piece of furniture onstage, turns out to be quite the adaptable supporting player as Psalm enacts fond reminiscences of growing up in Brooklyn, losing his virginity, founding the dance troupe Subtle Motion while attending Howard U., and growing from aspiring actor to accomplished artist.
His truest support along the 90-minute journey is actor-percussionist Jabari Exum, also brilliantly adaptable, whether stepping in to play backup dancer, bandmate, or various other roles.
Most often, Exum, also known as Jabari DC, supplies inspiring musical accompaniment on drums and percussion, as Psalmayene brings to life his search for self, and for flagrant womanizer Mapel. Some stories register as pleas to his dad, who was barely around when Psalm was a kid, became estranged as Psalm reached adulthood, then died before the two could firmly put their differences to rest.
Other tales from his life — including a fateful turn on Amateur Night at the Apollo, and an eye-opening stint as the only Black cast member in a European touring company of Pinocchio — illustrate tests of character that he could only have faced alone.
Warmly open in his interactions with the audience, Psalm entertains as a storyteller, while also transmitting layers of pain and grief, with hints of regret but no bitterness. And he uses humor effectively to handle sensitive subjects like the overwhelming anxiety of a Black man trying to choose a watermelon in the supermarket without looking like a stereotype.
These well-chosen bits and passages tend to offer modest stakes, definitely more life lessons than life or death. But we already know what’s at stake for fathers and sons, and we can feel for this artist, now a devoted husband himself, what’s at stake for him in every letter, real and imagined.
The letters themselves are the conversation and its record, poignant reminders to speak what can be spoken while you have the chance.
Dear Mapel runs through Feb. 13 at Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H St. NE.
Video-on-demand production will be available for streaming Feb. 14 to 27.
Tickets for in-person performances are $68, and individual tickets for streaming are $40. Call 202-399-7993, ext. 2 or visit www.mosaictheater.org.
Signature Theatre’s high-octane rock musical paints Hunter S. Thompson as a counterculture icon, but leans too hard on hero worship and too little on meaningful insight.
If you don't know or don't recall what a big deal Hunter S. Thompson was, he's here to tell you how big a deal he was -- and why -- in Signature Theatre's The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical, directed by Christopher Ashley.
In fiction, as he apparently was in life, the maverick writer is his own biggest fan, eager to blow his horn in this rock 'n' roll odyssey from Be More Chill creator Joe Iconis, who composed the music and lyrics, and co-wrote the show's book with Gregory S. Moss. Their story takes us through Thompson's unruly journey from middle-class kid in 1940s Louisville, Kentucky, to self-proclaimed major figure in American history, a leading voice of the '60s counterculture movement.
Much like the recent Akira Kurosawa Explains His Movies and Yogurt (with Live & Active Cultures!) at Woolly Mammoth, Emily Burns' Frankenstein, now at The Shakespeare Theatre, clings to the bumper of a more established artist's life and work.
Whereas Akira wrapped itself around one of film's finest auteurs, Burns uses Mary Shelley's gothic classic along with context from Shelley's life to make points, various and sundry. Although there is more substance here than in Akira, hitching a ride with Frankenstein feels equally unnecessary. Because, shed the gothic set and references to a monster, and this play is basically a portrait of a modern marriage.
There isn't a great deal of originality in Jamie Wax's new play, Call Me Izzy, but it may well mark the first time a white porcelain toilet has been featured so prominently in a Broadway production.
The 90-minute, one-woman show opens in the bathroom of a mobile home, situated in a trailer park in rural Louisiana, where Isabelle "Izzy" Scutley (Jean Smart, Hacks) spends much of her time, scribbling on sheets of toilet paper with a mascara pen. Poetically, she describes the various shades of blue produced by the disinfectant tablets that she gingerly drops in the tank. To her, they are beautiful. To her husband, Ferd, not so much.
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