THEATER REVIEWS : Survival of ‘Slave Girl’ : One-Woman Show Covers Old Ground, but It’s Valuable to Recall Past

The terrain covered in “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” is painfully familiar. Start with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” move forward to “Roots” and then dwell on the many other depictions of slavery and you have much the same story as can be seen in Irvine Valley College’s Forum Theatre.

But just because there’s little new in Tamiko Washington’s one-woman show doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. Any reminder of our inescapable past is justified; besides, at Friday’s opening night, several in the audience were young students apparently moved by the experience. As a history lesson, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” is worthy.

The one-act play, hardly more than an hour, was adapted by Deanna and Jon Sidoli from Harriet Ann Jacobs’ 1861 autobiography. Jacobs was born a slave in North Carolina in 1813, suffered at the hands of a brutal owner, then became a fugitive in the 1830s. The Sidolis, an Orange County couple long active on the local theater scene, lift the more harrowing events from Jacobs’ book.

It’s up to Washington, a Los Angeles actress currently teaching drama at UC Irvine, to vivify them. From the very start, as we see Jacobs contorted in an attic crawl space where she’s been forced to hide as a runaway for seven years, Washington turns her pain into a wail. It’s unsettling but dangerously overwrought.

The aggressively emotional acting continues throughout the production, but it becomes more affecting as time goes by. Although there are few respites in the seriousness, we begin to see that much of the joy has been roughly bled out of Jacobs’ life. In fact, Jacobs--as portrayed by Washington, with her intense eyes and eerie mood shifts--seems to have been left unstrung by her torment.

No wonder. We learn that she had a relatively easy life as a child until bad luck left her the property of a doctor who sexually exploited her. Jacobs received no sympathy from his jealous wife, and the abuse continued. Jacobs sought a bit of happiness by falling in love with a free black man, but her master put an end to that.

As her situation worsened, Jacobs became more desperate. Finally, she chose the life of a fugitive, even though it brought self-imprisonment. Her fate is eventually triumphant, but long in coming and never more than bittersweet.

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Director Jon Sidoli, an IVC theater instructor, is intent on making “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” elegiac and sometimes stoops to melodrama.

The denouement, where Washington is bathed in a honeyed light that takes forever to fade, with victorious music swelling up, could be more subtle.

But this overreaching is balanced by Sidoli’s obvious respect for his subject. Besides, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” has to be placed in context: As a tribute to Black History Month, it honors the lives, and suffering, of past generations.

* “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” Irvine Valley College’s Forum Theatre, 5500 Irvine Center Drive, Irvine. Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. Ends Sunday. $7 and $8. (714) 559-3333. Running time: 1 hour, 5 minutes.

Tamiko Washington: Harriet Ann Jacobs

An Irvine Valley College production of Deanna and Jon Sidoli’s adaptation of Harriet Ann Jacobs’ autobiography. Directed by Jon Sidoli. Sound by Jon A. Lee. Stage managers Erin Finnen, Trina Klossing and Beth Marsicano.