Darn It, But Thank You

The cast of Scrap Mettle SOUL in "The Whole World Gets Well."

Is the play the thing? Conventional theater directors will tell you that it is. Community performance directors might tell you otherwise. For them, the whole process is "the thing," and it’s complicated. It includes: the reason they found themselves in the community in the first place, the way the creative process evolved, how the material was gathered, who got involved, what social issues were addressed, what relationships were created, what changes occurred in the performers and their family lives, what changes occurred in the community and its political life, what really went on and what’s still going on after the whole thing is over. In this discipline, the process is a long string of events that are, maybe, more about life than art. "The Whole World Gets Well," a musical play by Chicago’s Scrap Mettle SOUL, is a case in point. After I had attended rehearsals, performances and the after-party of this community performance process, I knew it was a success – if the goal was to make everybody (including the audience) fall in love with each other. I watched cast members of different ages and races running lines in rehearsal while holding hands. I watched an audience so enthralled that it wouldn’t leave. I watched a post-show limbo contest that went on so long the management of the community center had to shoo people out the door. This kind of affectionate interaction has been going on annually in Scrap Mettle SOUL for eight years. The show itself? I had a great time. I was deeply affected by the power of the complex, beautifully written script and the authentic, engaging performances drawn from the mostly nonprofessional cast, which included people living on the street. But the play itself had some problems. The question for the critic is: What is good community performance?

Scrap Mettle SOUL (SMS) is a community performance ensemble of professional artists, teens and adults who live in Chicago’s Uptown and Edgewater neighborhoods, "the most diverse Zip Code in the country." The cast, crew and audience are representative of that community, and among them you’ll find people who drive Mercedes Benzes as well as people who push shopping carts full of junk, looking for a place to sleep. Founded in 1994 in his own neighborhood by director Richard Owen Geer, SMS operates after-school activities in Uptown’s Margate Park and story-gathering workshops where Uptown/Edgewater residents of all backgrounds and ages learn to articulate their experiences and create stories for performance. The annual Spring Show is the result of four months of weaving together local stories, movement, dance and music. (Read more about SMS in an article Geer wrote for CAN about urban community arts: "Dancing From the Heart: Urban-based Community Arts")

In 2002, a 75-member SMS cast presented "The Whole World Gets Well," comprising health-oriented stories crafted into a script by playwright Jules Corriere, with songs by Lloyd Broadnax King, live music by June Shellene, movement by Kevin Iega Jeff and staging by director Geer and filmmaker Chris Wieland. (Many of these artists are part of the national production company Community Performance Inc.) The performance took place during two weekends in May in the Margate Park Community Center gym.

The play opened in an emergency room full of people who couldn’t get help (or even the time of day) from the healthcare workers, and this theme ran throughout. "Community health" was defined very broadly, and included access to good healthcare programs as well as the freedom to walk down the street unaccosted and to breathe clean air. Sprinkled through the play were the memories of legendary Chicago storyteller Studs Terkel; the memories of folklorist Joseph Sobol about Appalachian storyteller Ray Hicks and his hospital visits in Chicago; the memories of activist P.C. Gooden-Smiley about a community scarecrow whose many disguises reveal a lot abut Uptown’s diversity; and the memories of a local doctor notorious for his generosity to the poor. Ultimately the message was that the whole world would get well if people were a little nicer to each other.

The large cast – including many children, a 94-year-old woman and several people well acquainted with life on the street – performed gracefully and often had the audience in stitches or in tears. The sensitive, audacious script gave them crisp, engaging stories to tell and they did so with great fervor. Squads of children appeared on cue and performed charming and complicated song-and-dance routines. The musical numbers often boosted the ante and were carried off with practiced ease.

I have long felt community performance is a director’s medium. It is his/her artistic vision that combines the whole thing to best advantage and makes it possible for so many untrained actors to do their best. Without a professional artist at the helm, community theater has all the magnetism of a high-school assembly. Recently, I have come to the conclusion that musical theater is the most powerful tool in their bag of tricks. Spurned by serious theater people, musical theater offers first-time performers other ways to communicate the material than straining toward great acting. I have seen music and choreography used to great affect by both Richard Geer and Liz Lerman, without doubt the two best directors in community performance today.

Unfortunately, it was the songs that were a problem in "The Whole World Gets Well." Some of King’s lyrics were utterly inscrutable. For instance, "Self-Contrail" (indicating both "self-control" and the contrail that leaves a mark behind a jet plane) was the song that opened the play. It begins with these two lines: "Grant me the ecstasy that I deserve / For strapping the chastity belt on the perve." Perhaps those lines came from a locally collected story, but nothing in the song or the play shed any light on them. The song goes on to wish for the nerve (rhymes with perve) "to laugh along with God." It was belted out with great gusto by the cast, but if I had been among them, I would have demanded an explanation. And it wasn’t the only problem lyric. Geer had no good excuse for why these songs were in the show except that creation time was rushed and by the time he realized they didn’t fit, it was too late to replace them. What I saw, he said, was like an out-of-town tryout, with no Broadway show in its future.

It is here that the question of excellence comes in. Watching a community play, it’s not always clear why a director makes the choices he does. Some elements can make you wince and other are just inexplicable. In one scene, a 94-year-old woman, playing Terkel’s wife Ida, was lying in bed, where she had one line. I saw two performances of the play and in one she said nothing at all. "She sometime says the wrong words or forgets. She’s almost completely deaf," Geer explained. He said there was a whole crowd of cast members behind the curtain pulling for her every night, waiting to see if she would make it. When she did, a cheer went up, not just backstage, but in the audience as well because, said Geer, they all know her.

"She’s been with the company for several years," said Geer. "This is the highest thing in her life. This crowns her life. Her courage, this tiny, frail old woman, to expose herself to all this danger! She used to be in a number of other scenes, but she couldn’t do it, so we had to rewrite it as young Ida and old Ida. We didn’t want to take her out of the play, which is always one of the challenges with these things. There are elements I would alter, change and delete, as one would, but there are now people attached to all those elements. If we remounted it, we’d make those changes, but only with a remount. It’s more important that the people have the experience. The scenes I have some issue with are scenes that people are having a great time being in."

Cutting is the devil’s work in this genre. Liz Lerman addressed this problem when I interviewed her recently in North Carolina. She said she has always seen community performance as a nurturing environment, for all the reasons I have explained above. But her new ambition is to add to that formula the "winning environment." Her goal is to make the piece as good as it can possibly be, and to convince the entire cast and crew to act as a team, with a goal of winning, of creating a successful work of art, as well as a healthy community experience. I later saw her company member, Peter DiMuro, explaining to a cast in one of their "Hallelujah" projects that he was making a painful but necessary last-minute change in the show and it was going to be one of those "Darn it, but thank you" moments. Then he had the cast recite: "Darn it, but thank you."

It seems most artists would include a good review on the list of things they hope for from a residency that includes performance: a glowing appreciation from someone who is completely divorced from the process. Yet some of the "best" performance experiences get the worst reviews. I have seen so many performances that were flawed, by conventional standards, but achieved maximum appreciation from their audiences. When I ran Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, California, with Tim Miller, we had numerous events that were hands-down winners with their audiences, yet mysterious to reviewers. One reviewer even gave a bad review to a piece that he said got a "standing ovation from the partisan Highways audience."

The mysterious element was the partisan audience, or many partisan audiences, that owned Highways. One such audience was a packed house of incest survivors that followed the work of Libbe HaLevy, who ran a poetry workshop for incest survivors. She felt performance was an essential part of the workshop process, a kind of testimony by the participants. She carefully crafted an hour of these new poets reading their work, which was definitely beginner-quality poetry, yet placed in a unique context. It included a poem about the memory of being raped by one’s father at the age of three months. The audience, some literally sitting in the rafters, practically flooded the space with tears and woke the neighborhood with shouts and applause. Maybe it wasn’t great art, but it was something, all right.

Another such example was the night we premiered the homegrown "AIDS: The Musical" as a benefit for ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, an activist group). It brought down the house. It was a Highways moment. To call the evening a success would be to call Hurricane Fran a little shower. I doubt that the show will ever have an extensive Broadway run, but being part of events like that, being in an audience like that, is the reason I follow community art. I think I know the meaning of true "audience development." So it’s hard to tell by observing a cheering audience whether you’re seeing good art or you’re surrounded by partisans.

The fact is, despite the "chastity belt" lyrical mysteries, "The Whole World Gets Well" had numerous instances that were so genuine, so gloriously right that they truly moved my heart. In one scene, an actor known only as Geraldine played a street person pushing a shopping cart. She was one of the most powerful and focused performers in the show and she commanded the stage like a great Shakespearean. Her song was a moment of triumph for the play. Co-director Chris Wieland later noted, "You are gnawed by the feeling that she has lived through some rough times, as have we all, that she is channeling that into her song and into her acting."

When I spoke to Geraldine back stage, I found she had had no other acting experience besides Scrap Mettle SOUL. She had joined the company after some "outreach activities" in the neighborhood. "Oh, I love it," she enthused, "I just love it." She said she was considering taking some acting classes "the next time I enter college." I complimented her on her talents and she said, "People have always told me, Geraldine, you talk too much. I told them they were going to end up paying to hear me talk." How do you define that quality? It’s hard to draw the line between luck, talent, heart and the results of a great community-art process. Geraldine’s song was the theme song of the play, which ended with the whole cast on stage addressing their hopes for community health to the high heavens. I was glad I flew all the way to Chicago for this experience, mysteries and all. Darn it, but thank you.

The Whole World Gets Well

Geraldine: Woke up drunk this morning
And so did my old man
He told me I looked butt ugly
So I hit him with the back of my hand

He came down upon my head
Like thunder from the sky
When I said "I cannot move"
He said "Bitch, I hope you die"

The doctors said my neck was broke
And I would never walk
I doubled up on my therapy
And now I’m walking down the block

Sometimes I get frustrated
And sometimes I fall down
But I put my old man in jail
And I am still around

Company: I will feel what it feels
When you got no pain
I will live out a life
That is halfway sane
When I jump on my bed
Like a trampoline
Then I’ll live in a world that isn’t so damn mean
You know I’ll be in a world that isn’t so damn mean.

Lloyd Broadnax King

Linda Frye Burnham is co-director of the Community Arts Network.

Read "Drum Sticks" a story by Eve Tulbert, the stage manager of "The Whole World Gets Well," on the CAN Web site.

See Scrap Mettle SOUL on the Web. Coming up from CPI: Boogaloo Broadcasting Company presents "Turn the Wash Pot Down" in Union, S.C. in July 2002, written by Jules Corriere. Extensive information about the artists and their working method is available on their excellent Web site.

The CAN archive contains a review of "Cross Tides" and "Hand Me Down Shoes" at Yoder Barn in Virginia, and an interview with writer Jo Carson.

Original CAN/API publication: June 2002