STAGE REVIEW : ‘Water Music’: Tale of Greed, Power in Africa

Some dramas build up to a message. “Water Music (Bakutu)” gives it to you right off the top: A hypnotic, soothing drum beat segues to an African storyteller recounting an animal fable which, in its imagery and political bite, evokes Orwell.

Three freeze-frame figures, backs to the audience, then spin around, pitched into a drama set in a Fourth World country--the Central African Republic (nee Empire) during the savage reign of Jean-Bedel Bokassa.

Director Beth A. Schachter’s staging catches the jangly rhythms in playwright Michael Erickson’s festering drama that flares under a rainy night sky in a house by a river’s edge. A Directors Theatre production at the Green Room Theatre on the USC campus, “Water Music” has intrigue, a nervous beat and a point of view that isn’t afraid to pluck the feathers of a noble freedom fighter.

This is a play about passionate ideals (actor Terrance Vorwald’s young American), greed and power (Josh Cruze’s Portuguese coffee planter) and fearful docility (Ernest Harden’s African servant). All three deliver stark performances that broil into parable.

Cruze’s smug European in his white cottons, berating his servant in French, drinking his Scotch, smearing his guest with sexual innuendo, is strongly countered by Thorvald’s own political game as a denim-tattered U.S. government health worker whose zeal and outrage are compromised by involvement in a botched assassination attempt on the life of Bokassa.

Between them glides the servant with his impossibly foolish service jacket. It’s a portrait enriched by Harden’s deceptive quietude. Director Schachter wrings momentum from these dynamics, not mere dialectic. And always in the air hovers the liquefaction of that enchanting title. Bakutu means water music, and Quami Adams’ light drum pattering paints the world outside the planter’s house--the riverbank sounds of “women (who) beat the water with their hands and forearms, playing the river like a drum. . . .”

The production, with textured lighting design by J. Michael Griggs, has its ragged edges. But playwright Erickson (a theater major at UC San Diego) is a promising conjurer not afraid to tackle big ideas.

At Hoover and Exposition, via Gate 1, Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m., through Sept. 4. Tickets: $6; (213) 465-8434.