A tour bus, owned and driven by Mary Wallace (top, mirrored),
makes its way through the South Bronx in The Foundry Theatre's
production of The Provenance of Beauty. Photos: courtesy of The
Foundry Theatre
Innovative performers try all kinds of ways to shake up and engage audiences, breaking through the fourth wall and messing with the environment in which audiences think they can safely hide and objectively judge. Some of these approaches aren't terribly fresh; others seem gimmicky; still others can backfire--but not in the case of The Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue, the latest production of The Foundry Theatre. Taking a tour bus filled with people on a poetic, eye-opening tour of the neighborhoods, history and contemporary social, economic and environmental issues of the South Bronx turns out to be powerfully effective and, yes, beautiful theater.
This travelogue, written by poet Claudia Rankine, created by Rankine with Foundry's founder Melanie Joseph, and directed by Joseph and Shawn Sides, runs for 90 minutes, during which the audience sits in air-conditioned comfort and separation from its object of attention--just as if it were safely tucked away in a darkened proscenium theater. But, here, the audience is on the move, in a bus, through the huge, winding geography of an unorthodox performance space that lives and breathes. The South Bronx plays itself. Bus owner/driver Mary Wallace maneuvers this unusual route; her driving is a skillful, sensitively-timed dance.
Our journey takes us out of one borough (from the curb in front of an East Harlem church) into the streets and past the landmarks of another (the Bronx neighborhoods of Hunts Point and Mott Haven), both home to predominantly poor and working-class people of color. On the day that I took the tour, the bus riders were mostly white theater-goers. Rankine's narration--voiced live by Sarah Nina Hayon and on recording by Raúl Castillo and Randy Danson--addresses the fraught relationship of gazer and gazed-at, desire for acquisition of land, the complicated nature of development and gentrification in old, storied neighborhoods, "the beauty of a place pulled out of the abandonment of another."
"What you look at will look back at you," Hayon says, as we roll towards the Willis Avenue Bridge and contemplate the moment at which it became amusing to New York's rapidly-assimilating white immigrants to shake their heads as they remembered their Latin-izing neighborhoods and quip, "The Bronx? No thonx!" I spied a sign reading, "The Bronx--All-American City," just as Hayon evoked memories of Howard Cosell's 1977 declaration, "There it is, ladies and gentlemen: the Bronx is burning."
Truly, much of what the audience sees, beyond its ironic, glass-enclosed captivity, is grim and worrisome. There's the prison barge and the gate where families enter to visit their loved ones; the Duane Reade colonizing a distinctive building that once housed a bustling dance hall; the Giuliani-bestowed green space sitting at the lip of a poisoned river, between a rock (a fertilizer plant) and a hard place (a waste water treatment plant). Even cheerful memories of La Lupe--"the woman with the devil in her body"--are compromised by the story of how this vivacious singer ended her days in poverty.
But let me assure you, there's life, and there's beauty. The bus windows subtly mirror each other. Each one creates not only a view of whatever and whoever is actually moving past your window but also a continuous, ghostly, kaleidoscopic stream of imagery from the opposite window. Well, you have to see it to believe how dazzling--and disorienting--this overlapping of actual and reflected human, vehicular and architectural imagery can be. Rankine's text sometimes hits (and hits hard) and sometimes misses (in fuzzy poetic musing) but often informs and challenges. She's at her best when she makes us think and when she conspires with the South Bronx to make us feel.
We roll along, unable to speak to the people we see outside our windows, people who rarely look toward us to make eye contact. I came to doubt that our contact would be welcomed. (A big tour bus? Filled with mostly white people?) By the time Mary Wallace momentarily pulled the bus into a somewhat spruced-up sector bearing the ominous name of SoBro, this confinement and isolation was beginning to hurt my heart. Then, to make matters worse, Hayon got off the bus and slipped away, melting into the landscape, rejoining the South Bronx in the act of being itself. I watched her go and keenly felt her absence.
We powered up and took the Third Avenue Bridge back to Manhattan.
East Harlem's Elmendorf Reformed Church.
The pickup/dropoff point for The Provenance
of Beauty. Photo: (c)2009, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
The Provenance of Beauty rolls now through late October. Get on the bus. For complete schedule information and ticketing, click here.
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