THEATER REVIEW : ‘Love’s Uprising’ a Brash, Sophisticated Look at Racism

The Hittites’ “Love’s Uprising/dat ol’ negro tradition: de lynch tree” isn’t just about revolution, it is one. This latest offering from L.A.’s premier African-American performance collective is one bruiser of a riot play. It deals straight up with what’s gone down. But it’s also an artistic manifesto: proof that you can be provocative, hip and theatrically rigorous.

More a fugue than a play, this striking work mixes an avant-garde interdisciplinary aesthetic with an activist agenda. There’s a narrative, but it’s just one part of a work whose ideas and emotions wash over you like music.

A raised platform sits center stage. Nooses dangle ominously from metal pipes at each of the four corners. They hang just outside the playing area, but never out of your mind’s eye. To one side, a dressing table and wardrobe rack serve as home base for Bert/Loa (a mesmerizing Charles Allen), the minstrel-commentator figure who weaves in and out of the onstage action and sometimes into the audience.

Act One is set on the porch of a South-Central home on April 29, 1992. It focuses on one extended family on this verdict day. But there are several smaller personal dramas going on here: a marriage has just been broken off, a white cop comes to visit the blind father, Oedipal and fraternal tensions simmer. Alongside the gangbangers and family friends, a couple of time-zapped slaves trek in and out.

Act Two takes place on a slave ship and a plantation, although the time is a mix of past, present and future. Here, too, writer Keith Antar Mason ingeniously weaves the personal with the political, showing rather than telling us what black men confront.

Directors Ellis Rice and Wheaton James, who are also part of the stalwart 11-member cast, have shaped Mason’s text into a visual and aural montage. There is never just one thing going on. Sounds and sights from all across the performing space--most especially Steve Moshier’s haunting score--add layers of meaning to the work. The staging envelopes you, appropriately enough for a meditation on the ways in which black men have been and continue to be surrounded by racism.

The Hittites have performed at some major spots: Lincoln Center and the Mark Taper Forum, for starters. But “Love’s Uprising” is more intellectually and artistically sophisticated than the piece they brought to those two venues last year. It’s a work that should be seen not just by Angelenos, but also by anyone who cares about where American stagecraft is, could be, or ought to be, headed.

Following each show, the audience is invited to stay for a discussion led by counselors from the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA). But the Hittites’ artistry is so strong, so urgent, that no amount of talk is likely to displace the images that’ll remain etched on your inner eyelids long after you leave the theater.

* “ Love’s Uprising/dat ol’ negro tradition: de lynch tree,” Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West L.A., Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays 7 p.m. Ends June 20. $15-17.50. (310) 477-2055. Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes.