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 6th
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.
