A SHOW GROWS UP
Star honors those who guided him in ‘Lackawanna Blues’
When Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s Off-Broadway show “Lackawanna Blues” was filmed for HBO in 2005, the actor wanted to play the lead role. This was, after all, his own story of growing up in a tight-knit Black boarding house in Lackawanna, N.Y., replete with a resident surrogate mother who saw to it that Junior came to no harm.
But in the end, the role of the adult Ruben went to a younger man. That’s show business for you.
Cut to the troubled fall of 2021. Now, the Manhattan Theatre Club is producing the show that was delayed by the COVID pandemic. Santiago-Hudson, now 64 and recovering from a back injury, reveals that what started out as a lively homage to a community of resilient eccentrics and abandoned souls has now become an older man’s elegy for the lost characters of his youth. “Lackawanna Blues” is now a celebration of those who loved him and taught him how to become a successful man.
Simply put, he makes the case that the older you are when you play this role, the better.
Playing at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, “Lackawanna Blues” is a one-man show with Santiago-Hudson playing all the roles, and his fans might expect it to have funny characters and some lively blues licks (in this production, courtesy of the on-stage guitarist Junior Mack). And so it does.
But few will be prepared for the emotional undercurrent present in Santiago-Hudson’s self-directed performance, which often feels like it is being interrupted by a well of feelings so strong that the actor struggles to process them in the moment.
Everybody mentioned in the show, which is based on real characters, is now dead. The maternal anchor of the material, a woman named Rachel Crosby (although widely known as Nanny), died in 1985. But it’s clear that she lives on in Santiago-Hudson’s heart as if she were still cooking her sustaining soup for the failing residents of her rooming house near Buffalo.
Frankly, younger people tend not to understand how these feelings for the past return so vividly as one ages. Clearly, that’s what happened to Santiago-Hudson. Maybe to his surprise. Either way, it’s this show’s secret sauce.
Performed memories often struggle to connect with audiences because they’re often esoteric. But Santiago-Hudson is a sufficiently skilled writer to universalize his own experience without undermining its crucial specificity.
In other words, you watch him and you think not only of your own parents but all the other people in whatever community you grew up in who helped you find your way. And if some or all of the above are no longer here, then you find yourself taking the same resonant, 90-minute journey as Santiago-Hudson.
It’s striking how many of the boarding house residents are missing some part of their body. In one case, frostbite stole a set of fingers, in another a whole arm was taken, in a third, a leg was lost. These men and women carry on with their lives, of course, but the absence of their corporal wholeness functions as a metaphor for their fractured lives.
But it’s when becoming Nanny that Santiago-Hudson most excels. He has down her voice, her intense delivery of sound, a body, a movement pattern, even a distinct gaze of the eye. Where he goes beyond many other actors who have assumed characters from their lives on a Broadway stage is that Santiago-Hudson seems to bring out her soul, too.
It is as if she were alive, which is clearly true inside the head of the man bringing New York this show.
“Lackawanna Blues” is about the push-pull of Black Americans seeking opportunity in what we now think of as Rust Belt America, about the promise of work and the vanishing of opportunity.
And it’s an homage to the retail structures of support that grew up in Black communities in the 1950s, as it details how one mission-oriented woman set herself up as a business owner, a solo philanthropy, a government aid office, a place for psychological counseling, a school and, at times, a church offering the needy salvation. Why? She just saw the need.
But this is also a profoundly personal statement of debt. If it weren’t such a cliche, you could say that Santiago-Hudson was observing the truth that it took a village.
It did and it always does, of course. And a great leader.
It is to the enormous credit of this small show staged in a time of recovery, that you’ll journey back across the landscape of your own life. Missing those who once loved you.