STAGE REVIEW : ‘Agee’: Voice for the Powerless

Just when we thought we’d reached saturation point with one-person shows, along comes “James Agee: A Heart’s Eye,” presented Sundays at the Mark Taper Forum’s Literary Cabaret customary hangout, the Itchey Foot Ristorante.

It is an experience--rich in texture, evocation, analogy and emotion, with its ironic basis in an extraordinary chronicle of the American poor: Agee’s and photographer Walker Evans’ 1941 docu-novel “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” adapted for the stage by Emmett Jacobs and Tony Plana.

Aside from being an ideal complement to Robert Schenkkan’s “The Kentucky Cycle,” currently on the Taper stage, it is, in its own right, a stirring investigation into the ravages of endemic poverty. In this case, Agee’s firsthand account of tenant farmers and sharecroppers in the Deep Middle South in the 1930s.

It was Fortune magazine that sent Agee and Evans to Alabama that summer of ’36 to gawk at the poor for an article that, as it turned out, would never be published. If the Great Depression was slowly ending elsewhere in the country, it attached itself like a barnacle to the disenfranchised of the rural Alabama earth where the destitute remained mired “in the sorrow of (their) working dirt.”

Agee, a Tennessee boy himself, emerged from the experience shamed, aroused, embarrassed and chastened. This voyeuristic raid on the misery of the poorest of the poor--the only thing these poor might conceivably call their own--became a book when Fortune relinquished the story to its authors. All that journalistic prying produced a unique document: a mixture of emotional subjectivity and reportorial detail, prompted by an unconventional coalescence of deep love for the people Agee met and deeper revulsion at the conditions of their existence.

This contradiction is fully grasped in Plana’s and Jacobs’ adaptation, as well as in the burnished intensity of John Bellucci’s quixotic performance as Agee, although the gentle, ardent man he portrays is less given to extremes than the real Agee was. Agee’s carefully mined words, however, his vision of “the cruel radiance, the furious reality of these people,” otherwise powerless and invisible, is vividly forged by Bellucci.

We meet these inadvertent players in his book one by one, by name, as Agee/Bellucci meets them in the evening’s first half, and then again when he completes the tale in the form of a lecture to his peers in the play’s second half. The experience is made immediate by close-up projections of the compelling Evans photographs. A picture may not be worth a thousand words when the words belong to as skilled and inventive a wordsmith as Agee, but it does ground the abstract in a hurry.

We look into the weary faces of people deadened by hopelessness, whose unused “intellects hang behind their eyes like foetuses in alcohol.” We peer into their creaky shacks “permeated with an odor of pork” and feel the bedbugs in the rough and lumpy bedding filled with corn shucks and straw. This is a portrait of stifling, inescapable poverty, “the ghastliest, cruelest of all the crimes of which humanity can accuse itself.”

No matter how romanticized (and they are), Agee’s exigent and shattering illustrations beg the obvious connection to our own diminished times. After sitting to “A Heart’s Eye,” it is impossible not to imagine looking deeper into the eyes of the next panhandler--or to deny that the dollar we’ll give will be given to assuage our own abiding helplessness.

Directed with deliberate simplicity by Plana, “A Heart’s Eye” is literate documentary made flesh on stage, and all the more disquieting for its forced distillation. The barer the message, the more exalted, wounding and rigorous its essentials.

* “ James Agee: A Heart’s Eye,” Itchey Foot Ristorante, 801 W. Temple St., Los Angeles. Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends March 15. $10; (213) 972-7392. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

‘A Heart’s Eye’

John Bellucci: James Agee

A Mark Taper Forum Literary Cabaret presentation of Emmett Jacobs’ and Tony Plana’s stage adaptation of “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” by James Agee and Walker Evans. Additional dialogue Emmett Jacobs and Tony Plana. Producer Corey Beth Madden. Director Tony Plana. Sets Edward E. Haynes Jr. Lights Philip D. Widner. Associate producer Mara Isaacs.