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.
Capitalism is an inescapable hell, one that has been turned into digestible television meant to gain more subscribers. Some of the best shows in recent years have used our money-driven, work-obsessed culture with our relentless pursuit of "the American Dream" to illustrate just how far someone will go for their goals.
Prime Video's The Consultant (★★☆☆☆) falls in line with this era of TV dramas, trying to go a step above the rest to craft something worthwhile, but whether it achieves any of this is a different story.
Created by Tony Basgallop, who previously helmed the Apple TV+ series Servant alongside M. Night Shyamalan, the dark thriller (which alleges it is also a comedy) stars Christoph Waltz as Regus Patoff, a sociopathic consultant who takes over Comp Ware, a successful mobile game company, after the CEO is killed by a "devil-possessed" kid obsessed with the company's games.
Since at least "Wrecking Ball," Miley Cyrus has trained us to expect a certain degree of shock and awe in everything she does. Even her runaway global chart-topper "Flowers" hinted at a larger work that was widely assumed to be a straightforward divorce album -- maybe a little more dialed-back, but still snarky and defiant in the way she has made an art of over the years.
Her latest release is indeed a breakup album, but it is an introspective and deeply self-aware one that wonders out loud what it means to disentangle your identity from a relationship that no longer exists and come to know yourself all over again.
Following the premiere of her first play In Love and Warcraft, Madhuri Shekar was heralded as one of today's fastest-rising and most prolific American playwrights.
Since that 2014 debut and its focus on video games and gamer culture, Shekar has also earned praise for her mastery at tackling intricate and distinct genres, as varied as science and science fiction, and historical drama and horror.
Shekar is at it again, this time with a contemporary American dramedy, or what Olney Theatre characterizes as "firmly in the mold of the great American kitchen sink dramas, leavened by a good dose of comedy."
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