Music & Dance Reviews : Women’s Festival: ‘Spirit,’ ‘Lifeprints’

Monologues with a confessional bent can be compelling, a fact not lost on the Sunday participants in the weeklong National Women’s Theatre Festival in Freud Playhouse at Macgowan Hall, UCLA.

But when those participants represent the disenfranchised, playing to and for their own, the performance can also serve as a rite of exorcism. That’s what it was, with varying results, for two culturally diverse monologuists sharing the stage with a dance ensemble.

If you think, however, that an African princess and a female nebbish from New Jersey have little in common, think again.

“Spirit Awakening,” in which Ghana-born Akuyoe narrates her exile to London as a child and learns firsthand the meaning of racism, shows how quickly self-hatred takes hold.

At Heathrow Airport she feels like “a speck of pepper in a sea of salt.” And when her mother melts into obsequious smiles before white authority, she loses her source of pride. Later, even in Spanish Harlem, she is ridiculed: “Where’s your spear?” asks a streetwise antagonist.

But Akuyoe--with her myriad voices and inflections, her commanding presence--always honors the stage. Single-handedly, she peoples a universe, one with humor and insight and breadth.

Mardiningsih Safiyah, on the other hand, seemed ill-prepared for this platform. Her “Lifeprints,” an unbelievable soap-opera-cum-candlelighting ceremony, maps the adolescence of a Jewish middle-class girl whose hypocritical parents turn to child abuse--and goes on to become a wife whose husband rapes her.

Safiyah’s insipid monotone, together with her pedestrian material and much tripping over lines, didn’t help breach the gap between comedy and bathos.

Neither did Marionne Kirk’s “Refugees, So to Speak,” a work for six dancers set to music by the wonderfully reedy-voiced Bulgarian Female Choir, go beyond undifferentiated melodrama, although it created some atmospheric stage pictures.