STAGE REVIEW : One-Acts Paint the Coloring of a Culture

“Colors! An Anthem to Cultural Friendship” is not only a barbed prelude to Black History Month but a compelling--make that eye-opening--prelude to white American history as well.

Our history books didn’t tell us about Thomas Jefferson and his slave mistress of nearly 40 years, Sally Hemmings. Playwright Erwin Washington’s one-act, “Sal,” sets this curricular omission on its ear in a work that is dramatic and deliciously controversial.

The second one-act, Velina Hasu Houston’s “Father, I Must Have Rice,” jumps to a charged contemporary racial paradox centered on the Amerasian daughter of a black father and a Japanese mother. This, too, is ripe stuff, as when the daughter recalls how black school kids used to call her “Nip-nigger” and then ask her, “Are you Brazilian? Are you real?”

The Ensemble Studio Theatre, in presenting its second annual Black History Month presentation, opened its one-week run Sunday night with a down-home celebration topped by greens and black-eyed peas. Most of the scheduled black celebrity stars didn’t show, but no matter. The event featured tributes to the late James Baldwin and to late actress and Ensemble Studio Theatre co-founder Sarah Cunningham (to whom the show was dedicated by her husband, actor and Ensemble Studio president John Randolph).

Artistically, however, the production is disjointed, overburdened with one turn too many from Lula Washington’s LA Contemporary Dance Theater and the Fire Choir gospel chorale.

In the case of the two one-acts, their preparation and staging appears a bit rushed and unpolished. But there’s no mistaking the thematic punch, irony and sting, of black culture past and present.

In “Sal,” playwright Washington does not leer at--or judge--Jefferson. He merely places him in the context of his time. Jefferson’s relationship with Sally is dramatized as not just another Virginia planter’s license to bed down with his property (although it starts out that way, in Paris). The relationship is, rather, seen as the central love of Jefferson’s life.

History records that Thomas Jefferson and his wife Martha had six children. It prefers avoiding what this play dramatizes: that Jefferson (Bill Erwin in a convincing performance) also had seven children by Sally (strongly played by Gammy L. Singer).

We learn that for expeditious reasons (“we can’t have Presidents involved in miscegenation,” groans the dying founding father), Jefferson reluctantly denies Sally her sought-after freedom in his final will (although he does emancipate her children).

As insight to the tone of its time, this play is sensational material, despite its rough edges. Others can argue its historic detail. But here is a show to tour the schools.

The balance of the roles are essayed capably by Nomi Mitty as Jefferson’s daughter Martha, who is an uptight keeper-of-the-flame, and Richard Biggs as Jefferson’s freedom-seeking son Madison. Diann McCannon directs with compassion and all-out fire in a mutually hateful confrontation between Jefferson’s imperious daughter and his loyal Sally (who at one point calls herself a half-sister to Jefferson’s dead wife).

In “Father, I Must Have Rice,” race relations between Asians and blacks are both seriously and humorously explored during a wedding rehearsal. The bride (Deborah Swisher) is Japanese/African (as she likes to call herself) and the groom is Japanese/American.

Patti Yasutake’s direction is slipshod, but the production is salvaged by its humor and its provocative dialogue (“Blacks are the only Americans who came to this country against their will”). There are two solid performances: actress Takayo Fischer’s wacky and lovable portrait of the groom’s Japanese mother and actor William Marshall’s festering, sensitive study of a black father accompanied by his Japanese wife. Deep down he wants his black/Japanese daughter to marry black, not Japanese.

This is a father who complains that at weddings “rice bags are racially insulting. You don’t see blacks throwing watermelon seeds at black weddings!”

The play cleverly enlarges upon the “Colors” of the title. A scheduled third one-act, Michael Hayne’s “All That Lasts,” dealing with native American Indians, was indefinitely postponed.

Performances at 1089 N. Oxford Ave. run nightly, 8 p.m., through Saturday. Tickets: $8-$15. (213) 463-1442 or (818) 780-0925.