The Magic Theatre stages “Grandeur,” a play by Han Ong.
Writer Han Ong frequently evokes the word “paradox” when describing Gil ScottHeron, the subject of his newest play, “Grandeur,” opening Wednesday, June 7, at the Magic Theatre.
At 19, Scott-Heron, the black singer, poet and self-described “bluesologist,” wrote the spoken-word poem, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Its musical recording in 1970 made the title an indelible expression of the American lexicon — one that most people know even if they’ve never heard the song. Scott-Heron’s career, two novels and a slew of albums, was prolific and lauded for years afterward.
Then, by the mid-1980s, Scott-Heron largely disappeared.
“There’s a line in the play — we go to the sad ones, you know. The sad cases. They are haunted and they are haunting,” Ong says. “So I guess Gil only truly started to haunt me around the time of the sort of one-two punch of the release of the album and then his sudden death. That was sort of very moving to me. A victory and then a death in close proximity.”
In 2010, Scott-Heron made a triumphant, acclaimed return with “I’m New Here,” his first record in 16 years, only to die the next spring at 62. “Grandeur” takes place in between the two events, imagining an interview between a journalist named Steve Barron (Rafael Jordan) and Scott-Heron (Carl Lumbly) following the release of “I’m New Here.”
Staged almost entirely in Scott-Heron’s apartment — based on his real, lightless apartment where bed sheets were reported to have always been drawn up to block out any
incoming light — the journalist attempts to dissect the rise and fall of Scott-Heron, a personal idol of his.
“There’s something between his mastery and the discrepancy of his afterlife — how small he still seems in the afterlife — that is moving,” Ong says.
Indeed when people now ask Ong what his newest work is about “and you say, ‘Oh, it’s about Gil Scott-Heron’ — you more often than not get a blank look.” The sadness of this fact, Ong adds, is only compounded by Scott-Heron’s self-destructive streak — a tragic and unavoidable facet of his latter years.
Although samples of his voice appeared prominently in contemporary hip-hop — many glorified Scott-Heron (often to his own objection) as a godfather of the genre — the artist lived hermetically in a darkened apartment in Harlem, fading in and out of a crack cocaine habit.
But to reconcile the charismatically genius force of ScottHeron with the darker realities of his later, reclusive life is to deal in paradox.
In this time, Ong says, ScottHeron “has released a new album which requires him to be public, and yet at the same time the last few years of his life, the state of vulnerability and the state of self-inflicted harm, have made him to want nothing more than to be continually private.”
These clashing forces, of glory and erasure, haunted Ong into writing “Grandeur.”
The new work marks somewhat of a return to the stage for Ong, who is shuffling back and forth between his base in New York and San Francisco in preparation for the premiere. The 49-year-old Filipino American writer and high school dropout made an early name for himself nationally with a handful of plays and one-man shows in the ’90s. In 1997, he earned a MacArthur Fellowship at the age of 29.
But two well-received novels, “Fixer Chao” in 2001 and “The Disinherited” in 2004, took him away from theater. Aside from a surprising (as he calls it) 2014 play in New York City, “Grandeur” brings him back, and specifically to the Magic Theatre where he staged an early work 25 years ago.
Yet “Grandeur,” which Ong wrote in 2014, was not necessarily an effort to write a definitive Gil Scott-Heron play.
“What you don’t want is a character who gets on stage because you need him on stage, but he doesn’t want to be on stage,” Ong says. “But in my head this Gil — what we call ‘our Gil’ because it’s emotionally true but it’s certainly not strict autobiography — our Gil wanted to talk. My Gil wanted to talk.
“I have to hesitate and say, I didn’t feel like I was channeling Gil’s spirit,” Ong adds. “There was no seance-like thing, and I never felt during the writing or the process that Gil was looking over my shoulder either in encouragement or in warning. He was neither my friend nor my enemy.”
This doesn’t mean the play’s conception of Scott-Heron is heedless. Snaking around the walls of the Magic’s rehearsal space are pages taped up composing historical timelines of Scott-Heron’s career and relevant world events, along with details on artistic influences and photos tracing his aging appearance.
Referring to a concept explored in the play itself, Ong notes that theater often starts with a central thesis followed by characters being situated around its idea, as opposed to starting with the characters themselves and following from there.
“Grandeur” falls in the latter category, driven by a journalist who, with his own personal emotional investment, holds a mirror up to ScottHeron of his younger self, where some of the dynamism still exists in the artist. The result invokes both heartbreak and joy, Ong says — again, a paradox of sorts.