Keen observations are triumphs of an outsider
When Giovanni Adams launches into his effulgent solo show, “Love Is a Dirty Word,” it’s as if he’s immediately racing against the clock. Words gush out of this young man’s mouth, not because Adams’ narrator is in danger, but because he observes his world with unquenchable hunger, exulting in whatever enters his field of vision and then in his own conscientious, hyper-articulate expression of it.
The Tilted Field production, which opened Saturday, Nov. 11, at Z Below after a summer run in Los Angeles, is an exercise in sharing as much delight as possible in a limited time.
But Adams’ keen powers of perception derive only partly from his joie de vivre. He observes also because he is unshakably an outsider, never fully of his world, no matter where he is. His Jackson, Miss., family calls him a “sissy” with impunity, even as they clearly love him — both in person as an adult and in childhood photographs he displays, he has a smile that could win any pardon — even as he begs them to show him how to be different. “Grandma, I wanna be good, but you gotta show me how.”
At Yale, he can no better explain to his rowing crew why his family didn’t attend a regatta than he can explain to his family what a coxswain is, or why he’d even play a sport as foreign as crew, when he’s not even rowing. For them, “just the idea of 125-pound me yelling at a bunch of white boys on a boat to row is apparently some funny-ass s—.”
Directed by Becca Wolff, the piece works best when it makes no attempt to shoehorn in a through line, when Adams simply devotes his full, loving attention to whatever crosses his field of vision, vaulting from thought to thought as his body leaps atop a chair or a desk: Bubbles in his father’s hair are “snowfall atop his wild nappy black Afro crown.” Inside a new home, where the family moves after his mother divorces his now-jailed father, “there’s nothing more reassuring than vacuum tracks on carpet or the pungent waft of chlorine bleach.” He is just as heedful of the numinous as he is of the empirical. His mother, playing cards with friends, might have a “swagger about her tongue and wrist, holding the near-full glass of Beringer White Zinfandel, cackle nesting on the back of her throat.” But, he adds, “I tell you a secret: she prays for a man.”
Especially refreshing is the way Adams chronicles his late-blossoming sexual awakening. There’s no single climactic coming-out moment, no grand narrative rise and fall. It’s quieter, more inward, like stepping into a garment that’s unfamiliar but that’s always been there, waiting.
The piece falters a bit when Adams forays into songs (all of which he composed, accompanied by Arturo Lopez on the guitar). His nonmusical writing is so singular and so vivid, that his song lyrics — “I can’t trust my feelings inside/ You own me” — feel generic by comparison, the transitions into them ungainly. Late in the show, efforts to sculpt narrative look cheesy, with lines like “I been running from my own reflection,” or the choice to bury a shirt in a pile of dirt as the narrator reckons with his past.
“Love Is a Dirty Word” bills itself as a tale about a queer black man’s effort to be loved when the world deems him unworthy. But from the beginning of the show, everything about Adams’ bearing — his pride, his spunk, his smarts — suggests the piece wants to be about something simpler: a remarkable artist’s rapturous, triumphant spirit.