Poet’s bold words fail to inspire ‘Grandeur’
Han Ong’s “Grandeur” has beautiful and wise things to say, much like its subject, Gil Scott-Heron, of “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” fame. In envisioning an interview between the poetic, sui generis musician and a cub essayist, Magic Theatre’s world premiere anoints words with religious potency. Their power to pinpoint and lay bear devastates, yet their infinite capacity to combine and recombine elevates. The right verbal rhythms, “Mr. Heron” (Carl Lumbly) says early in the script, “float on the lips; they glide in the mind.”
But in the show’s current incarnation, which opened Wednesday, June 7, under the direction of Loretta Greco, it’s not yet clear that Ong’s radiant language is best served on a stage.
You’ve seen this set-up too many times before. A groundbreaking artist now past his prime lives in undignified seclusion, his genius still flaring, still able to drop exquisite bits of craft as if they were nothing. Now, though, his passion lies less in art and politics than in his next fix.
He speaks in koans designed to frustrate and humiliate Steve (Rafael Jordan), his latest fanboy interlocutor,
whom Ong has engineered to commit so many journalistic faux pas (at which ScottHeron can conveniently quibble) that you halfexpect the play’s central revelation to be that Steve doesn’t write for the New York Review of Books at all, as he claims. That isn’t the case, but you might still wish it so, just so you could witness something happen in real time.
Instead, you see stasis. A jonesing ScottHeron remains unknowable to the point of onedimensionality; a hubristic Steve stays naive. Thankfully, the young journalist doesn’t have to make some grand discovery that his idol has fallen from grace, or about how Scott-Heron feels about being called “the godfather of rap,” or about why he had such a lengthy fallow period.
Steve already knows most of that spelunking into Scott-Heron’s crepuscular apartment, where piles of books and records shoot up as might stalagmites in a cave. (Hana S. Kim did the claustrophobic scenic design.) But without asymmetry in knowledge, little drives the plot forward, and Ong’s alternative mainspring, revealing too little, too late, feels just as contrived, like a gotcha moment that “got” precisely nobody.
Most surprising is Safiya Fredericks as Scott-Heron’s adopted niece Julie, who has suffered long at the artist’s riddles and manipulations but isn’t mere victim. She gets to manipulate and deceive in her own right. And if the play doesn’t let Julie declare in words that she’s done with these men and their limitless selfishness, a drill-like Fredericks nonetheless, in one moment, bores out a deadly silence that lets everyone know her Julie is capable of anything, anything at all.
You’re best off forgetting how dialogue comes to pass and instead savoring words out of context. Here’s the prophetic Scott-Heron on the deaths of black American men before Black Lives Matter: “Each song you wrote, each book you started, was a detective story in disguise, all of them asking the same question: Who’s killing all these black men?” Here he is toward the end of the play, speculating about his words’ legacy: “The lyrics remain young, and they fly like they were intended to ... when I first snatched them from the air.”
For their snatching, we remain indebted. For their transposition to the stage, we remain hopeful.