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.
In its gung-ho gruesomeness and gleeful sense of camp, Michael Windsor's lively staging of American Psycho at Monumental cuts to the quick of the macabre musical-comedy based on Bret Easton Ellis' 1991 novel.
From the nylon tarps covering the theater walls to a strobe-lit massacre set to Huey Lewis' "Hip to Be Square," Windsor's production captures the humor throughout the adaptation by Duncan Sheik (music and lyrics) and D.C. native Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (book).
The show also aptly conveys the horror of homicidal protagonist Patrick Bateman's foul acts and urges. Namely, lead Kyle Dalsimer nimbly treads the bloodstained tightrope of embodying Bateman in a tight song-and-dance performance, while savagely letting loose as the demon banker of Wall Street who fears his mask of sanity will soon drop.
In 1996, the original Twister stormed the summer box office, winding up as the year's second-highest-grossing movie (behind Independence Day). Directed by Jan de Bont, who was still riding high off the success of Speed, Twister was loud, action-packed, and, especially when viewed today, utterly of its time.
It's totally '90s Hollywood, from the treacly, faux-Spielberg score, to the glow of Helen Hunt's movie stardom, to the fact that the only non-white cast member among dozens of characters has just a single incidental line. There was plenty that filmmakers might do differently with a sequel.
More than thirty years and thirty-plus films into her late-blooming screen career, beloved character actress June Squibb at last mounts her own star vehicle -- and it's a cherry red mobility scooter.
The surprisingly swift scooter happens to be the vehicle of choice for Squibb's indomitable title character in Thelma, a sweet and satisfying first-time feature from Josh Margolin. Building from a solid premise, the filmmaker finds a warmly funny mode of low-key action-comedy, driven by nonagenarian Squibb as cute but tenacious 93-year-old widow Thelma.
And even a 93-year-old action hero needs a cool ride, especially on a crusade to track down a villain. Thelma's perilous adventure will take her all over town, doggedly on the trail of a cell phone scammer who bilks her out of ten grand.
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