Tribute to a ‘Delta’ Woman’s Journey

Awoman travels the bumpy road from prostitute to Ph.D. in Endesha Ida Mae Holland’s autobiographical tale, “From the Mississippi Delta,” a 17-character piece (played by three actresses) opening tonight at the Itchey Foot Ristorante downtown, an entry in the Mark Taper Forum’s literary cabaret series.

“It’s a tribute to her mother and other African-American women who saved their children from poverty and despair,” said Shirley Jo Finney, who’s directing the staged reading. The story traces the lives of Holland’s mother--a midwife later murdered in a Ku Klux Klan raid--and her own: from the cotton fields of 1950s Mississippi, to rape at age 11, stints as a stripper and hooker, and finally her awakening in the civil rights movement.

Within Holland’s own journey (told in stories and song), “You see man’s inhumanity to man, the injustice we inflict on each other--and still, the will to survive,” said Finney, who’s drawing on memories of her own mother, who died recently, as well as the African-American oral tradition. “I realized in the last year, the foundation (Finney’s mother) laid for me as a human being. You don’t see it until that parent figure is gone--that contribution that Mom has created. So this piece is really for her.”

IN THE BUFF: A month ago, the Taper staff was wondering how audiences would react to an ultra-violent scene in “Hope of the Heart” (Adrian Hall’s adaptation of the stories of Robert Penn Warren), in which a crazed and vengeful slave owner chops off the hands and feet of an errant slave, then throws the limbs into an open incinerator. In Hall’s figurative staging, the slave hangs upside down from the ceiling; a few feet away, the master hacks at a slab of beef on a butcher’s table, tossing the scraps into the fire.

The Taper’s concern about the scene seemed justified at the time: In its last production, “Miss Evers’ Boys,” a scene depicting an excruciating spinal tap sent several theatergoers spinning out of their seats and into the lobby. (In response, warning signs were posted in the lobby.) And six years ago at the theater, a lengthy blackout interlude in the prison-set “In the Belly of the Beast” also provoked its share of audience panic.

This time around, however, it appears that nudity, not violence, is the real audience-shocker.

“We’ve been surprised,” admits a Taper press rep. “People have been very affected and moved by the (dismemberment) scene. But most of the phone calls and preview response cards have been responding to the nudity in the show.” The three instances: a tableau of a nude man standing upstage, a male character changing clothes and a lengthier scene in which a woman’s clothes are removed in a sexual setting.

THEATER BITS: Entries in South Coast Repertory’s third annual California Playwrights Competition are due Nov. 15. California residents who have written full-length plays (never professionally produced or optioned) may contact SCR’s literary department, P.O. Box 2197, Costa Mesa, Calif. 92628-2197. Large-scale musicals, children’s plays, translations, plays in languages other than English and previous entries are not eligible. American Express has underwritten first and second prizes of $5,000 and $3,000, and entries will be considered for SCR’s 1991 California Play Festival.

The Actors’ Gang’s acclaimed production of Brecht’s “The Good Woman of Setzuan” has taken a brief hiatus; after two weeks off, they’ll reopen Thursday, and continue at the Odyssey to Dec. 2. . . . Salome Jens reprises her portrait of poet Anne Sexton in her award-winning one-woman show “. . . About Anne,” opening Nov. 7 at the Fountain Theatre, as part of the theater’s month-long poetry celebration.