STAGE REVIEW : Stories From a Civil Rights Rite of Passage

We’ve come a long way, baby, from the songs of Stephen Foster and that dim view of the South filtered through unreconstructed romance.

We’ve had Lorraine Hansberry’s “Young, Gifted and Black,” Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” and George C. Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum.” We’ve had Wolfe’s vision of Zora Neale Hurston’s “Spunk,” seen in its earliest and liveliest version at the Itchey Foot Ristorante in May, 1989.

It was part of the same Mark Taper Forum Literary Cabaret whose astute producer, Corey Beth Madden, has now pulled off another small wonder with another collection of vivid stories from the African-American experience. This time they’re from the pen of Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland.

Holland is not exactly a household name, but “From the Mississippi Delta,” which opened Sunday, may make you run for the nearest book shelf to get more of this woman’s writings and related tales chronicling her personal emancipation out of Greenwood, Miss., to Minneapolis.

Not that it’s all that unusual. Anyone who has, as Holland puts it, “made somethin’ of myself,” has had entertaining or remarkable anecdotes to tell. It’s the quality of the telling that makes the difference and, in this case, it is enhanced by the coincidence of Holland’s own rites of passage with the civil rights movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s. The one was mirrored in and bolstered by the other.

Yet this 17-character piece played by three actresses never strays far from the subjective--Holland’s life and that of the women around her: her mother, a midwife who had made something of her self and became known in Greenwood as “the second doctor lady”; the water meter watch of the vigilant Miss Rosebud Dupree--and the author’s own saga.

It takes us from a stark, almost wordless confession of rape by a white man at 11, to very funny forays as an apprentice stripper and as a student in the frozen north, where Holland found support and her kind of people in a bar by the train depot, warmed her Southern self by the fire of a KKK cross, and came to her own full blossoming in the swelling ranks of the civil rights movement.

Holland uses black argot as exuberantly as did Alice Walker in “The Color Purple” and the result is an impetuous work of great character, humor and dignity. Plenty of credit must go to director Shirley Jo Finney for recognizing the rhythms and pauses that nourish these portraits and for giving unhurried shape to the piece.

She also deserves credit for selecting the unalike actresses who deliver it. Tall and elegant Cyndi James Gossett gives an account of the young girl’s rape filled with the shock and shame but no self-pity.

Tiny Roxanne Reese, whose fully clothed bumps and grinds make her Delta Queen stripper act unforgettable, is a sly comedian whose rubber face invents whole galleries of characters. And L. Scott Caldwell’s smoldering inner fire is a match for Holland’s. In addition, her linguistic versatility covers a broad range of keenly-observed people--notably, the feisty Miss Rosebud and Bro Pastor, the nasally plugged-up and terminally bored minister who officiates at Holland’s mother’s funeral.

Delbert Taylor provides strong musical support at the piano--sometimes too strong for the unmiked voices. But this is a minor quibble in an evening of major pleasures at bargain prices that deserves a longer life than the Itchey Foot run provides.

It would be smart to move this show intact to another venue, before someone tries to enlarge, embellish and spoil it.