Until relatively recently, if a New York playwright wanted to bring to life the neighborhood in which he'd grown up, he'd create a storyline and put a large cast of characters into conflict within that specific arena. Think Street Scene, Elmer L. Rice's 1929 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, which was set in front of a brownstone tenement and featured thirty of its immigrant inhabitants, plus a policeman, medics, an ambulance-chasing shyster, an ice-man, an old-clothes man, and two students. The play had three acts, each of which was an hour long.
Flash forward to 2010 and Dael Orlandersmith's Stoop Stories. Also set in front of a tenement (whose stoop serves as the set), this play has no storyline and just a small group of characters, all of whom are impersonated by the playwright, in just under an hour.
Orlandersmith, an African-American poet and performance artist, came of age in Harlem and Spanish Harlem in the 50s and 60s. Her "New York gumbo" of a show looks back fondly at her 'hood, with its mixture of black, Caribbean and Latino inhabitants gathering in the street to gossip, drink, joke and dance the hot summer nights away. Then came the 70s crack and heroin reign of terror; the devastation it wrought -- crime, addiction, death -- forced Orlandersmith to try and "get off the stoop."
Her intelligence and creativity -- honed in a local public library -- saved her. She made it out of the inner-city and started a new life in the East Village, but many of the people she left behind were not as lucky, which is why so many of her stoop stories are obituaries, elegies.
The one that stood out most vividly was her verbal portrait of the drug-addled but still-beautiful Billie Holiday struggling valiantly through one of her last love songs.
Orlandersmith writes with heart and performs with conviction and fire.
