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‘Gem of the Ocean’ dramatizes 20th century African-American experience

Here in the North Bay, there’s more good news than the recent rains. The opening weeks of 2016 have also been exceptional ones for local theatergoers. First came Ross Valley Players’ moving Holocaust classic, The Diary of Anne Frank, whose run at the Marin Art & Garden Center’s Barn ends on February 7. Simply staged with a strong non-union cast, the production’s emotional honesty never wavers and (as an added bonus) ticket buyers will find it relatively easy on the wallet or purse. Community theater at its best.

On the other hand, if you want to move up a notch, Mill Valley’s Marin Theatre Company (MTC) has just opened August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean, the first (in historical setting, but not date of authorship) of the late double Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist’s series of 10 plays that trace, decade by decade, the African-American community’s difficult journey through the 20th century. True, the entry price at MTC is a bit higher, but if you go you will be rewarded with a production of such quality, freshness and professionalism that its impact will probably remain with you for months to come.

Set in 1904, Gem is predominantly a play of ideas and atmosphere, rather than plot. What exists of the latter revolves around a large old house in Pittsburgh’s Hill District that local authorities have allowed to become a no-questions-asked “sanctuary home” for former slaves arriving from the South. In the opening scene we meet the residents. There’s Black Mary (Omoze Idehenre), the formidable cook/housekeeper, who keeps the place in some semblance of order; Eli (David Everett Moore), a kind of household assistant; Solly Two Kings (Juney Smith), an imposing escaped slave from Georgia who hates white Americans because they don’t accord him the respect he enjoyed during a prior stay in Canada; and a new arrival from Alabama, Citizen Barlow (Namir Smallwood). Visiting from outside are Caesar Wilks (Tyee J.Tilghman), Black Mary’s brother, who has gained respectability as a Pittsburgh law enforcement officer, and Rutherford Selig (Patrick Kelly Jones), a white travelling salesman whose easygoing demeanor has earned him a ready welcome.

Rare Gem – MTC stages August Wilson masterpiece

The late August Wilson's penultimate play, the supremely lyrical and gorgeously written 2003 drama Gem of the Ocean, may be set in 1904, but its themes stretch purposefully back in time to the beginning of New World slavery and reach forward to the present, when African Americans are still fighting many of the same struggles.

This timelessness is sewn into the script of Gemlike the old quilts and collages that Wilson gave as inspiration for his work, blending lush historical detail and remarkably well-drawn characters into a plot that unfolds like a roll of fabric, with language and dialogue that moves from colloquial specificity to the heart-breaking heights of pure poetry.

In Daniel Alexander Jones' sometimes baffling but emotionally rich staging, Wilson's engaging words are embellished with a kind of hand-clapping, finger-snapping, sign-language-style choreography that resembles dance but stops short of having his characters actually burst into ballet or the soft shoe. It's a technique Jones calls "theatrical jazz," something the young New York–based director is known for.

“Illuminating, devastating and beautiful.”

Gem of the Ocean

Through her walled displays that could as easily be in an art gallery as on a theatre’s stage, Kimberlee Koym-Murteira captures the essence of the themes and stories of August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean. A beautiful liquid prism wall of overlapping squares of many shades of blue recalls the journey of slaves across the Atlantic. Wooden chairs (one with a washboard as backing) hung on a wall, to be used as needed and then returned, speak to a people that have had, time and again, to set themselves down in humble settings before picking up and moving on again. A massive collage of scenes from the 1904 Hill District of Pittsburgh both establish the time and the location of the story and the nature of the intertwined stories that will act as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to paint an overall picture of the past, present, and future of Africans come to America. Finally, the walls all rest on a floor that suggests that great, faraway continent where the ancestors of those we will meet were so horribly separated forever. Marin Theatre Company presents a soaring, sensitive, and -- in every way imaginable -- sensational production of this first of August Wilson’s plays about the African American experience in the ten decades of the Twentieth Century.

The beginning of any new century is often full of hope while still carrying the consequences of the past one. The collage of stories of those living and passing through 1839 Wylie Avenue are of those who remember slavery, those who risked lives for theirs and others’ freedom, those who are working hard to establish their own roots in what is in essence a new world for them, and those who are still running from oppression toward hoped-for salvation. Framing all the pieces of our evening’s puzzle is a too-familiar story, then and now. An African-American man is accused wrongly of a petty crime (in this case, stealing a bucket of nails from a local mill) and ends in his committing suicide, choosing to die as an innocent rather than be falsely jailed. This atrocity inflames this 1904 Black community, resulting in an uprising and an act of destructive defiance that will be repeated over and again in Watts, Boston, Memphis, Baltimore, and too many other American cities. As background music (composed and directed by Kevin Carnes) of distant African chants, moaning hymns born in slavery, early jazz notes, and later hints of honky-tonk and even rap so profoundly alert us, August Wilson’s play is truly one of yesteryear, yesterday, and today.

“A gem… See it.”

Another Gem From Marin Theatre Company

One of the many benefits of MTC's quest to present plays by Wilson, Lopez, Gurira, Power, and others, has been the opportunity to watch some terrific African American actors perform. So we've seen the Bay Area's great Margo Hall in both Fences and Seven Guitars, and the less well known but strong actress Omoze Idehenre in Seven Guitars and last season's stunning Convert—as well as a number of outstanding actors who haven't performed here before, such as Smith and Smallwood, who play pivotal roles in Gem of the Ocean. The other fine actors in this Gem include David Everett Moore, Tyee Tilghman, and Marin's own (Caucasian) Patrick Kelly Jones.

It tells you something about this company and its audience that the play's run has been extended even before the reviews come in. See it. And if you want to know more about August Wilson and you live in the Bay Area, you're in luck. Thanks to MTC's sponsorship, the excellent American Masters episode "August Wilson: The Ground on Which I Stand," which premiered last February, will air on KQED Pluson Sunday, Feb. 7.

“Bold, exciting and engrossing”

A ‘Gem’ infused with jazz

Thirteen years is an unusually short time for a play to be considered a classic, but such is the monumental stature of August Wilson’s Century Cycle that some theater artists have come to believe that it’s time to give all 10 plays the Shakespeare treatment. Meaning, depart from the standard fairly naturalistic productions and soar on the wings of Wilson’s bold images and the grand spoken arias he wrote for his characters.

That’s the bold concept behind the often exciting, sometimes confusing and generally engrossing “Gem of the Ocean” at Marin Theatre Company. Director Daniel Alexander Jones, known for his “theatrical jazz” approach, stages the early 20th century Pittsburgh tale with a decidedly non-realistic set, bursts of the African drums and proto-jazz of music director Kevin Carnes’ emotive score and shifts into stylized movement passages, ranging from modern dance to flat-out vaudeville.

It’s remarkable how well some of his experiment works. “Gem” contains some of Wilson’s richest arias, deepest looks back into an African past and the most extended passage of mythic or mystical ritual.

“Sensational.”