Theater Review—

90 Minutes Isn’t Long Enough For Excellent ‘Blue Album’

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN — Over the last few years, a surprise hit in New York City was something called Bridge and Tunnel, a one-woman show by a performance artist named Sarah Jones. The conceit of the play was an open mic poetry reading, organized by a Pakistani immigrant named Mohammed Ali, and held in a small auditorium buried deep in the infrastructure of the Queensboro Bridge. Ms Jones played a collection of over a dozen characters, immigrants of all ages, races, and  nationalities, each of whom stepped up to the mic to deliver a dramatic monologue revealing their hopes, dreams and resentments, along with their original poetry.

If you saw Bridge and Tunnel and liked it (and I loved it) you will definitely enjoy Long Wharf’s current Stage II Production,  the world premiere of The Blue Album,  which was commissioned especially for Long Wharf by artistic director Gordon Edelstein.

Organized like a record album, the playbill features a “track list” giving the titles of the 22 sketches and monologues, written and performed by David Cale and Dael Orlandersmith, working in amicable collaboration. (He wrote his stuff, she wrote hers, and they admire each other enough to leave it that way.)

As on any music album, some of the “cuts” are much longer than others, ranging in length from 23 seconds to a little over 12 minutes. What ties them all together is the way they express feelings of pain, sadness, alienation and loss, capturing on stage, the haunting quality of  blues music.

Cale is an English songwriter and actor who fled to America at age 16, with his mother dead and his father in jail. Orlandersmith is an African-American woman from New York, who dropped out of college to become a writer. As with Ms Jones in Bridge and Tunnel, they use their voice and body language to segue from one character to another, changing race, age, nationality and gender at will.

David is by turns a closeted young clerk in a London music store, both repelled and fascinated by Trevor, a brazenly flagrant queen who teaches him a song that goes “You live in this world like you’re in somebody else’s house”; a country music fan fingering Dolly Parton’s wigs wishes he could find a girl to love him with the kind of love Dolly sings about; an uptight young marketing executive named Linda who allows herself to picked up on a plane to San Francisco by Nick Morelli, a contractor with dreams of being a park ranger in “The Affair”; a successful black dentist in a hotel Italy who is mistaken for a waiter by an American woman, realizing that because of his skin color he will always be “a nigger”; and an insomniac widower who, while walking on the beach at night in California, is picked up by Judy Garland.

Dael begins as an elderly Holocaust survivor, remembering a magical night in Harlem when he met Billie Holiday and she sat at his table and shared a significant moment in “Herman and Billie.” She goes on to play a back-up R&B singer who ends up performing the banquet circuit and is suddenly humiliated by an upscale black woman executive who dismisses her as a “minstrel show,” the kind of entertainment that degraded their race. She also plays a gay man who laments the fact that he can’t hold his lover’s hand in public, as they leave a wedding (until the lover pretends to have hurt his knee and must hold on in order to walk), and, in  “My First Time,” the longest and most powerful piece in the show, a tough girl from the South Bronx who made it out of the ghetto, but has haunting memories of  rape and brutality .

The show runs for 90 minutes without intermission, and the audience clearly would have been happy to stay for 90 minutes more. The performers are so talented, and the writing is so moving and affecting, that it is like being in attendance at a jam session by two great musicians, taking turns to riff off each other, even as they sit back and appreciate each other’s gifts. It will be on until the end of April, and you should go and see it while you can.

(Performances continue until April 29. Curtain is Thursday through Saturday at 8 pm, Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday at 7 pm, and matinees are Saturday at 3 and Sunday at 2.

Call 203-787-4282 or visit LongWharf.org for ticket purchases or details about special related programs.)