There’s a haunted magic to the old neighborhood, where every landmark, every street corner is heavily laden with memories. Dael Orlandersmith’s solo play “Stoop Stories” captures a stroll through the playwright’s own childhood neighborhood in Harlem, sparking a lot of difficult memories of the difficult lives of people the first-person narrator knew and loved or just used to see around. It’s a passionate elegy for the troubled neighborhood of her youth.
Kicking off Aurora Theatre Company’s 30th season, “Stoop Stories” had long listed in Aurora’s season as a show that would be performed in person if possible and otherwise offered online as a filmed production. The latter scenario is what’s happening now.
Known for her dazzlingly poetic and deeply resonant solo pieces, Orlandersmith earned rave reviews two doors down at Berkeley Repertory Theatre with her two-hander “Yellowman” in 2004 and performing her own “Black n Blue Boys/Broken Men” in 2012. “Stoop Stories” premiered in 2009 at the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C.
Styled like Orlandersmith for this show, with long braids, tremendously versatile local actor Jeunée Simon flows fluidly between the strolling narrator and the people in her neighborhood. Sometimes they’re people she runs into in some semblance of the present, sometimes people she remembers listening to long ago.
She takes on the personas of a teenage poet strung out on drugs, a similarly afflicted middle-aged former rock musician, a Polish Holocaust survivor reminiscing about the night he met Billie Holiday, a cocky and sweet-natured 16-year-old boy “maintaining my cool” in the face of adversity, an old classmate gushing about her boy-crazy teen years, and a cranky elderly woman kvetching about having to take multiple buses from Harlem to the Village to see Nina Simone.
The shifts from one character to another aren’t marked off by dramatic lighting shifts or other stage effects in director Elizabeth Carter’s smooth and sensitive production, though certainly Jon Tracy’s moody lighting and the street noises and music choices (familiar R&B, jazz) in Ariella Cooley’s sound design help set the scene. And despite the range of characters, Simon remains in the dark casual suit that costumer Regina Evans gives her.
The flow is much more like stream of consciousness. The narrator talks about someone she remembers or an area she’s walking into, and then her voice and bearing shift seamlessly into another person. Then the scene might spark a stream of poetic musings that don’t feel necessarily tied to one character or another but existing somewhere in the space in between, and then we’re back to the narrator before the shift has even registered.
In fact it’s all lushly poetic from beginning to end, just in different voices, different beats. Orlandersmith’s language is gorgeous in a way that you really want to savor as it drifts on to the next thing. Like memory, it’s a slippery, moving target — unless you pause and rewind, that is.
From the very beginning there’s a jagged edge to the reminiscences. The rats, the smell of garbage, the sounds of violence, all the people drowned in drink and dope. It’s a loving portrait of the neighborhood, but the kind of love that hurts to the bone. The love of someone who had to leave, had to get away from all this, in order to live the life that she’s lived.
Though the show’s intimacy would be potent in person in Aurora’s cozy space, that same quality also makes it work particularly well onscreen. Randy Wong-Westbrooke’s scenic design grounds the meandering narrative around a realistic front stoop of a tenement on the Aurora stage.
Directed by Jonathan Luskin and edited by Mark Leialoha of Flying Moose Pictures, the videography beautifully captures Simon’s resonant performance from several angles, keeping the experience intimate.
Glimpses of the empty audience seats barely visible in the darkness add to the poignancy of the piece, lending a sense of that same palpable absence that the narrator experiences as she walks with one foot on the street beneath her in the present and the other in the neighborhood of her remembrance.
Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.
‘STOOP STORIES’
By Dael Orlandersmith, presented by Aurora Theatre Company
Through: Available for streaming through Oct. 3
Running time: One hour and 15 minutes, no intermission
Tickets: $25-$30; 510-843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org
