STAGE REVIEW : Anger Fuels Mason’s ’49 Blues Songs’

Keith Antar Mason’s “49 Blues Songs for a Jealous Vampire” wraps around its viewer’s throat like the best applied choke hold and hardly lets go for 90 minutes. In fact, it engages the audience before the lights dim. On stage, a tightly muscled African-American male is tied to a post. Clad only in a red thong, he remains there the entire evening, representing the “forbidden” black sexuality that threatens white America so.

Mason’s work, a poignant, Afrocentric play that borrows elements of performance art, pivots on the aftermath of the Rodney G. King beating trial verdict. Its in-your-face drama is powered by the same anger that fueled the L.A. riots and highlights the archetypal coming-of-age experience for too many urban, black males: harassment by the police. To illustrate, five men are trapped in an interrogation room--a sort of black man’s purgatory--in the “boom box of L.A.” The room doubles as an auction block, and both act as barriers to freedom.

Our narrator is history professor Dr. Spook (Mason), child of Aunt Jemima and Bojangles, who taunts his audience with occasionally hilarious commentary laced with biting sarcasm. His tongue-lashing includes Ross Perot, Clarence Thomas, Spike Lee and Philip Morris Inc.--the sponsor of Lincoln Center’s Serious Fun! Festival, where the work was presented recently.

Dr. Spook’s lesson spans black history from slavery and the tale of Cinque (played by Joel Talbert), a slave who overpowered his captor’s ship and stood trial, to the evolution of blues music (“Blacks didn’t invent the blues; someone gave them to us”), to Lee’s upcoming film “Malcolm X.” In between, he calls for a second Democratic convention to nominate Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) and fantasizes about the day when white people leave Earth via spaceship to defend the heavens against recently discovered aliens. “Leave me here,” he says, “to clean up the air and water . . . and rise up new pyramids.”

Dressed either in red thongs or the ultra-hip fashions of Cross Colours (the label’s tag line: “Clothing Without Prejudice”), the ensemble serves as Dr. Spook’s Greek chorus. All are members of Mason’s Los Angeles performance collective, the Hittite Empire, and they work beneath five dangling nooses against a backdrop of abstract paintings by Mark Bradford. Individual performers break away for brief soliloquies; Ellis Rice does a startling rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” complete with all four verses. In each verse he stresses the lyric, “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” which in this setting becomes a symbolic burning of the flag.

At times the play may seem disjointed and far too esoteric, but anger is rarely rational. Besides, racism, which is at the play’s core, makes no sense either. It’s essentially a monologue vehicle for Mason, with the rhythm of a rap song. Lines of dialogue are repeated again and again. “I’m guilty when you say I am . . .,” the cast chants; the effect layers his message and gives it strength. It is also a vague reference to the play’s title, which comes from bedtime advice Mason’s grandfather gave him as a child: Sing 49 blues songs back-to-back to keep vampires away.

But repetition can also be mind-numbing, as Dr. Spook explains when he decries the King beating trial as a conceptual art piece. Rising from his rocking chair, Mason asks what a naked, black hand means. “They said it meant resisting arrest . . . (King) was saying, ‘Help me’ . . . (the video) was seen over and over in slow motion until it don’t mean nothing.”

Obviously a skilled wordsmith, Mason’s uncensored peek at the rage of the modern-day African-American male (and his profanity) undoubtedly caused some viewers to flinch, particularly when he reminded his mostly white audience that they are somewhat responsible for today’s racial discord.

He has wisely written without an intermission--holding the audience hostage to his vision--but more than a handful escaped anyway, underscoring his point and proving that “49 Blues Songs” should be required viewing in a nation where justice may not always be for all.