STAGE REVIEW : ‘Dark Fruit’ Examines the Underbelly of Gay Black Life

In this age of AIDS, it seems like there’s been a representative sound bite from every voice in America. Except perhaps, from black homosexuals. Pomo Afro Homos are back at Sushi through tonight to set the record straight.

Hailing from San Francisco, the talented trio joined forces two years ago to explore their own joy, anguish and ambivalence as post-modern African American homosexuals. Like their group moniker, their latest work, “Dark Fruit,” is another bit of word-play on their racial and sexual identity. But it’s also fruity in the crisp and delicious sense, and dark in revealing the underbelly of the black gay community.

“Dark Fruit” was first performed last year at the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Public Theatre as part of “Moving Beyond the Madness: A Festival of New Voices.” It is made up of five vignettes, with two group sketches book-ending the autobiographical solo pieces.

They are all funny in parts, angry at times, angst-ridden, satirical and poignant. Probably the least compelling of the five is the first, although it does establish the evening’s tenor, tone and topic--interracial relationships.

Adapted from a 1960s pulp/porn pseudo-science novel, the opening piece, “Black and Gay: A Psycho-Sex Study,” sports a pseudo-scientist (Brian Freeman as “psycho-sexologist”) giving a pseudo-intellectual lecture, accompanied by erotic slides and dramatizations of the book’s so-called “shocking” news that “racism exists in the world of homosexuals.” It seems that “Negroid homosexuals prefer Caucasoid sexual partners.” And there’s the rub.

There’s a lot of prancing and posing, it’s intentionally way overdone, but Freeman’s pubescent white boy is a hoot, despite the fact that, caught in flagrante delicto by a prissy, waspy schoolmarm (Djola Bernard Branner), the white boy gets off scot-free, and the young black boy (Eric Gupton) is ruined for life.

A piece titled “Sweet Sadie” follows, Branner’s bittersweet remembrance of the tough-as-nails mother who abandoned him emotionally when he was young, and now, wracked by Alzheimer’s disease, she’s abandoned him mentally. Branner slides easily between characterizations of his young mother and his past and present self. A tad overwrought at times, this moving piece has more to do with children and parents, love and resentment, than with race or sexual bias. And that’s why it works.

Freeman’s “Doin’ Alright” talks about his days in Dorchester, Mass. as “a very young Miss Thing.” He was best friends with Dennis, who later became Denise. Denise winds up dead, apparently having found him/herself in the wrong place at the wrong time. But, says Freeman, in his conversational, matter-of-fact style, “When you’re poor, black, effeminate and gay, life is the wrong place at the wrong time.”

In “Tasty,” Eric Gupton convincingly plays a gentle, hard-working, bespectacled office temp who, never having been with a “brother” before, gets seduced by a wealthy black supervisor (a deep-voiced, tight-lipped Gupton), only to find that the guy has a live-in white lover.

There is no machismo here, and no powerful role models. These are men in pain, wounded and ambivalent. Problems are presented; no solutions or resolutions are offered. The Pomos are just opening the door to the closet, and it’s dark in there. . . .

The emotional culmination of the evening is the epistolary finale, “Chocolate City, U.S.A.,” in which one man (the Magic symbol) wields a basketball (volume up on Tina Turner’s “We Don’t Need Another Hero”) and the other two fire off a series of hot-tempered letters addressed to everyone from the President-elect to Magic Johnson himself, to the Media, to AIDS activist organizations, and to the Pomos’ dead poet-friend. Almost everyone gets excoriated for their do-gooding denial of HIV and the gay black community.

This is not agit-prop. It’s not preachy, aggressive, in-your-face alternative theater. At the end of “Dark Fruit,” you may come away enlightened, perhaps disturbed, but you might also feel like you’ve made three new, personable, funny, talented, heartbreaking friends, excellent mimics and raconteurs, who invited you into their lives and ever-so-naturally (expertly directed by Susan Finque, neatly costumed by Eugene (Yo) Rodriguez), told you their stories.

“Dear America,” they say plaintively in “Chocolate City,” “we need our voices to be heard.” Their voices should be heard. Pomo Afro Homos have plenty to say.

“DARK FRUIT”

Written and performed by Pomo Afro Homos. Directed by Susan Finque. Costumes by Eugene (Yo) Rodriguez. Slides by Pam Peniston and Brian Freeman. Sound design by the Pomos and Jill Posener. With Djola Bernard Branner, Brian Freeman and Eric Gupton. Tickets are $12. The last performances is at 8 p.m. tonight, with a special benefit performance of last year’s “Fierce Love” at 10 p.m. At Sushi Performance and Visual Art. Call 235-8466.