Listening Closely to the Sounds of ‘Silence’

Silence is seldom golden. Neither is Michael Datcher’s long one-act play “Silence.”

Datcher’s poetry, essays and a memoir have received acclaim. But his bio reflects no previous theatrical experience. “Silence,” which he wrote and directed, played a single performance Friday in the Harold M. Williams Auditorium at the Getty Center.

The title character, Birmingham Silence (Jenoyne Adams), is a famous performance artist who’s conducting a brutal boot camp for disciples who want to teach at her studio. She claims to have narrowed the pool of candidates from thousands to just four--all, like herself, African American women. She’ll pick only two. The setup sounds like “A Chorus Line” set in the performance art world.

The contenders include two sisters: Addie Mae (Jennifer Bowens), who can’t find a good man, and Denise (Ramee Randall), who’s a married man’s mistress.

Also competing are Carole (Fumilayo Bankole), who has left her twin sons in the hands of her white husband, and Cynthia (Yuri Hinson Tabu). Cynthia recently attempted to hang herself, after years of sexual addiction and parental abuse. The other candidates are relatively carefree.

Datcher’s text doesn’t acknowledge this disparity with enough detail. However, he has Silence requiring Cynthia to use an actual noose in her art.

Silence was also an abused child. Her minister father applied pliers to her tongue and taped a pacifier into her mouth to keep her quiet. How Silence overcame all that to become an artist who has been profiled on “60 Minutes” is never explained.

Silence now employs her father’s pacifier technique on the candidates and on Free (Jaha Zainabu), who appears to be her secretary. These are the play’s most dramatic moments.

The women’s monologues veer perilously close to the pretentious and the impenetrable, and they show up too soon, before the audience is oriented to what’s going on. It’s unclear if their style represents an acerbic judgment on the performance art scene or if Datcher hasn’t translated his language well enough from the realm of spoken poetry into that of a play.

The names of the four job candidates are the same as those of the four girls killed in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, and the play is set in the basement of a Birmingham church. We’re told all this in a program note. The reference is unmentioned in the text and comes off as more of a red herring than a metaphor.

Billy Childs wrote a score that serves as a virtually constant, mood-enhancing background, performed admirably by a live band. But the music and the spoken words occasionally distract attention from each other, unhinging the focus.