The Black Clown Adapted from the poem by Langston Hughes By Davóne Tines and Michael Schachter

The Black Clown

Adapted from the poem by Langston Hughes

By Davóne Tines and Michael Schachter

Music by Michael Schachter

Directed by Zack Winokur

At the American Repertory Theater

Loeb Drama Center

Harvard University

August 31 to September 23

Review by Wendell Smith 

The first thing you should do with this review is put it down and get online to see if you can get tickets to The Black Clown at the A.R.T. before it sells out. Ironically, given its subject, it is an entertainment not to be missed.

Ironic, because this entertainment grows from a poem that says a black man must overcome his culturally imposed role to be a clown and entertain us. Published by Langston Hughes in 1931, it can be read in less than the three minutes allotted at most open mikes. At the A.R.T. it has been turned into 70 minutes of absorbing theatre. 70 minutes where we are captured by the Muses through word, music and dance and led to a prospect where we are forced to look back at truths about our collective selves (the awful truths of our history) to seek to be healed and find hope for redemption through tears and shared community.

With one agonist, The Clown, exquisitely sung by Davóne Tines, and a chorus of equally accomplished singers and dancers, The Black Clown is rooted in the 6^th century BCE Greek origins of our theater, fulfilling the Aristotelian purpose for poetry: it evokes our pity and fear to cause the purgation of those emotions.

The poem, as published in 1931 and provided in the program, has this stage direction for an epigraph, "A dramatic monologue to be spoken by pure-blooded Negro in the white suit and hat of a clown, to the music of the piano or an orchestra." A line runs down the left-hand margin of the poem to separate it from an outline for the music and the actions of the chorus called, “The Mood.” Here is a short sample from the beginning of the poem, which demonstrates that Hughes’ knew the potential for his poem, knew it would flourish, if it were ever to find the right soil, water and nurturing attention, would bloom as it has at the A.R.T.:

THE MOOD                 THE POEM

A gay and                     You laugh

low-down blues.           Because I'm poor and black and funny –

Comic entrance            Not the same as you –

like the clowns             Because my mind is dull

in the circus.                 And dice instead of books will do

Humorous                     For me to play with

defiance.                       When the day is through.

The program identifies 17 musical numbers by name but they flow into each other so that, with two exceptions they do not stand as separate songs. Those exceptions are, as Hughes calls for their use in “The Mood:” “Nobody Knows [the trouble I've seen],” and “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Chile.” In their adaptation Tine and Schachter do not use these songs in their entirety but impress them upon us by repeating their iconic phrases.

“Nobody knows the trouble I've seen, nobody knows my sorrow,” in their rendition becomes a refrain without the solace of, “Nobody knows but Jesus.” and is presented, as Hughes suggested it should be, when the performance has progressed through his poem to this section:

Three hundred years

In the cotton and the cane,

Plowing and reaping

With no gain –

Until, at last, through the staging of that repetition we come to see and feel those “troubles” and “sorrows” as the chorus turns them from an abstract lyric sung by a Gospel choir into the visual substance of dance, and, in doing so, connects them with their source, slavery; a source, which we haven’t experienced but, until now, only observed. Here we cannot avert our gaze from this foundation of our culture but must see what whiteness does.

Hughes wants the second of those traditional songs to follow these lines:

Freedom!

Abe Lincoln done set me free –

One little moment

To dance with glee.

Then said this again –

No land, no house, no job,

No place to go.

Black – in a white world

Where cold winds blow.

Here Tine and Schachter have the chorus begin a funeral procession while singing “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child;” repeating it again and again as a dirge and carrying a chair above their heads as a symbolic casket they flow off the stage through the audience and back on the stage where the procession concludes the dirge as a member of the chorus lies down on the stage and a banner printed with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation is used for a shroud while they sings these lines by Hughes:

Not wanted here; not needed

there—

Black—you can die

nobody will care.

With that The Clown reaches his nadir, and we are halfway through the poem; now the performance pivots and begins to swing up. Initially this is through the resistance of Jim Crow illustrated with piece of magical stagecraft. The Clown sings

Yet clinging to the ladder,

Round by round.

Trying to climb up,

Forever pushed down.

as a ladder made of light comes down from the scenery loft; The Clown tries to climb it, he get one rung off the floor but can’t climb any higher because, as he pulls this endless ladder of light past him, it disappears into the floor. The production has that kind of theatrical flair from its opening through the triumph its conclusion:

Cry to the world

That all might understand:

I was once a black clown

But now –

I'm a man!

The Black Clown is the culmination of collaboration between Davóne Tines and Michael Schachter that began 2010, a year after their graduation from Harvard. The A.R.T. became involved in 2015. The result is a complete piece of absorbing theater directed by Zack Winokur with choreography by Chanel DaSilva, music direction by Jaret Landon, sets and costumes by Carlos Soto, lighting by John Torres, and sound by Kai Harada, tickets on line at https://americanrepertorytheater.org/shows-events, at the Loeb Theater through September 23.