CityBeat Fringe Coverage 2008

Review: Your Negro Tour Guide

Critic’s Pick

For approximately five years, I worked in close physical proximity to Kathy Y. Wilson at CityBeat, sometimes editing her column, “Your Negro Tour Guide.” Wilson has a distinctive voice — both in person and in print. She’s loud and sassy when you’re within earshot, and she’s thought-provoking, even incendiary, on the page. Her rants in CityBeat between 2000 and 2006 attracted and irritated readers. Many of them were collected in a 2004 book of her essays, NPR commentaries and more.

Now she’s onstage, channeled through actress Torie Wiggins, a CCM drama grad, whose one-woman Fringe show at Media Bridges channels Wilson and more: Wiggins not only captures the joy and sorrow of Wilson’s words, she re-creates some of the personas that Wilson used, like a fast-talking woman demanding a hair-weave-and-nails makeover in 30 minutes or another who explains the mindset behind “talking black to the screen” at movie theaters.

There’s humor, too, in the interspersed sections of “Versus” that provide interludes throughout the 55-minute performance: “You have Seinfeld, we have Rock. … We have James Brown, you have Elvis Presley.” It’s a great device that had Wiggins’ audience nodding and saying, “Mm-hmm.”

But the best parts of Wiggins’ performance happen when she takes on Wilson’s more impassioned material: “Lemme holla at you today,” she begins, delivering the writer’s contemporary take (“A BeBop for MLK”) on the “I Have a Dream” speech — she calls it “I had a dream.” It’s a vision of unity and peace that ends with diverse people joining arms and singing “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.” With that Wiggins raises an eyebrow, fixes a smirk on her audience and finishes, “Then I woke up.”

There are a few Cincinnati references, especially a touching Mother’s Day letter to Angela Leisure, mother of Timothy Thomas, whose shooting by a white police officer pulled the pin on the grenade of local riots in 2001. But many of Wilson’s CityBeat columns had more universal messages: In “O Brotha, Where Art Thou?” Wilson took on black males ages 13-55, saying, “You’re scaring me,” referring to them killing one another. “It’s like a snake eating its tail,” she observed. With increasing emotion and anger, Wiggins presents Wilson’s point: “People died so you could be free to be better. But today you’re killing each other and it can’t get much worse.” Then she brings it home: “Let’s make love. Let’s make it better.”

I suppose that Wiggins and her director Jeff Griffin have assembled a more palatable version of Wilson than you might get from reading her complete body of work. But they have certainly captured her vibrant prose, her strident, self-righteous attitude, and her zeal to say things that others have hesitated to discuss.

That was the power of Wilson’s writing, and it comes to life in Wiggins’ performance. Wilson was at the opening night performance I attended on Thursday; her raucous laughter from the back of the room reminded me how she could disrupt the office and make us think at the same time. But it was the words and thoughts erupting from Wiggins’ performance that reminded me of Wilson’s powerful voice. It was good to hear it again.

— Rick Pender

Review: Southwest Ohio Society of Badasses

Like a small projectile lodged into a skull, the memories of a miserable youth tend to stick with you. You carry the torment around, wishing you could shed it, but also oddly comfortable that it’s there, all the time, reminding you of what you lived through and theoretically made you stronger.

Getting it out, sharing it, has to help. That simply must explain Southwest Ohio Society of Badasses, the Fringe 2008 offering from This Ain’t Real Theatre Company. Written and directed by Miami University theater professor William Doan, Badasses is as much catharsis as performance. It’s a venting: loud, crass and emotional. It needs to be all of that and more to get those deep-seated feelings out in the open.

But while it’s daring and personal, it’s also not the most polished piece of theater (even Fringe theater) available right now. It tries really hard, but you can also see it trying really hard, and that takes away from its effectiveness.

Badasses centers around the early life of Bud (played by Justin Baldwin) and his tumultuous, abusive relationship with his stepfather, a man so strict he would literally lash out at Bud for every rock and stick his lawnmower would hit in the yard. The unseen character — appropriately named Dick — is nothing short of despicable; he’s like a Johnny Cash song character without the cowboy charm. At the brink of adolescence, Bud is so scared of the old man that we’re told he develops blisters in his mouth.

And that’s pretty much the show. We watch Bud grow older, but the hatred stays the same. The relationship and dynamic never really arc. Not to minimize or downplay the seriousness of what we’re examining: abuse, especially by a parental figure, is awful stuff. But as a plot for this particular show, it just never quite goes anywhere.

Not that the creators don’t try to keep it interesting. I actually liked how the show made fun of theatrical devices. It’s pretty self-aware. So much so that there is an actor onstage (Alex Homer) who literally just sits behind a microphone and announces when flashbacks are occurring and who uses reverb to signify a particularly foreboding offstage voice.

Badasses is at its best when it’s loose and funny, when Bud can sit back and tell those great growing-up stories that we all have. His sometimes involve freak BB gun accidents.

At those times, the show lives up to its name. But when it tries too hard to hit home, it comes off too “after school special” — and that’s not badass at all.

— Rodger Pille