STAGE REVIEW : ‘Rabbit Foot’ a Tapestry of Black Life

A rabbit foot is supposed to bring luck. But not for the rabbit.

The Rabbit Foot, in Leslie Lee’s play of the same name at Los Angeles Theatre Center, is a band of traveling entertainers who bring joy into the lives of much-abused black sharecroppers in Mississippi, circa 1920.

But the members of the Rabbit Foot aren’t very joyful themselves. If only they could follow Ma Rainey up north. . . .

And if only “The Rabbit Foot” could play in repertory with “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” . . .

Lee’s play is a rich and complex tapestry of social and cultural upheaval. Occasionally the tapestry seems to be mounted on a museum wall instead of coming to three-dimensional life inside a theater, and the weave could use minor tightening. But the high quality of the material is clear.

Lee juxtaposes the story of the final days of the Rabbit Foot with the story of three of the Foot’s fans: a young World War I veteran who has returned to sharecropping, his wife and his grandmother.

In Shabaka’s staging, the Foot is on the east side of the stage and the sharecroppers on the west. But members of both groups have their minds on the North, the promised land--be it Chicago, New York or even Paris.

The boll weevil has devastated the Mississippi economy, and the knowledge of other places--where the racism might not be so virulent--has agitated the area’s black residents. Many are migrating.

Both groups of characters are divided over the issue of whether to head north. The leader of the Foot, Singin’ Willie Ford (Shabaka), has a soft spot for the soil of the South, and he insists on fulfilling the group’s obligations to its unseen impresario. It’s never made clear whether the impresario is black or white--information that might add another dimension to the group’s situation.

The other singers in the group are restive to various degrees, but none more than Holly Day (Loretta Devine, last seen as the other Holiday, Billie, in “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill” at the Old Globe). She’s the one who finally leads a rebellion against Willie.

She makes her move a bit too late for the purposes of dramatic momentum. Lee takes a lot of time showing us the Foot in performance and setting up his issues in backstage conversations before anyone begins to act on them.

Still, the gradual accumulation of character details is worth the wait. Besides Willie and Holly, we get to know big Bertha (Esther Scott), who is truly living the kind of offstage life that feeds the blues, and Johnny Hopper (John Marshall Jones), a dapper ne’er-do-well with budding resentments over his subsidiary role in the group.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the stage, it’s young Berlinda (April Grace), who is itching to head north, while her husband, Reggie (an impassioned Thomas Mikal Ford), and his grandmother, Viola (Ethel Ayler), hesitate.

Reggie is the most problematic character. He talks incessantly about how well the French treated him during the war, making him feel like a real man for the first time. He even fathered a child in France, a fact unknown to his wife but which he confides to his grandmother. He would presumably be more anxious than anyone else to move to what were considered better opportunities.

Yet he resists the move, and he spends a lot of time trying to organize his fellow sharecroppers. While he probably has his own motivations for playing the reformer instead of the migrant, they are not sufficiently dramatized.

The segues between the two groups of characters are fairly superficial until the second act. Then, the members of the Foot enter an agonized daydream that Berlinda is having, transforming it into a musical sequence that journeys from the Lord’s Prayer to an African ritual dance. It’s an eloquent trip into the deep recesses of the African-American experience.

The two groups finally meet in the flesh near play’s end, after the Foot has been tragically reduced to just Willie. This, too, is one of the play’s most powerful moments.

Douglas D. Smith’s lighting compensates for the fact that his set is too anchored in literal reality. Still, it would be interesting to see the entire play mounted on more of a dream landscape. The Rabbit Foot half of the set is especially too solid and immobile for what is supposed to represent the shifting venues of this itinerant troupe.

The Foot’s actual performances, overseen by musical director Michael Skloff and consultant Robert La Pierre, are shrewdly calculated to make it clear that the Foot probably would not be as successful as Ma Rainey. The cast cooperates, with Devine twisting her voice into a rasp, complete with a dangerous-sounding cough, and Scott losing her musical balance to the comforts of the bottle.

“The Rabbit Foot,” Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring St., Los Angeles, Tuesdays-Sundays, 8 p.m., Saturday-Sunday matinees, 2 p.m. Ends June 16. $23-$28. (213) 627-5599. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

‘The Rabbit Foot’

Ethel Ayler: Viola

Loretta Devine: Holly Day

Thomas Mikal Ford: Reggie

April Grace: Berlinda

John Marshall Jones: Johnny Hopper

Esther Scott: Bertha

Shabaka: Singin’ Willie Ford

Mykal Ali, Kevin Moore: Musicians

A play by Leslie Lee. Director Shabaka. Sets and lights Douglas D. Smith. Costumes Marianna Elliott. Sound Michael Friedman. Musical director Michael Skloff. Arrangements Rick Hozza and Robert La Pierre. Choreographer Joyce Guy. Hair and makeup Elena Maluchin Breckinridge. Stage manager Michael F. Wolf.