‘Jazz’ works best when it’s most like Morrison’s novel
Company’s staging takes a while to cohere
Theater, for all its sui generis magical powers, can’t do interiority quite as well as prose can — that dark descent down the mine shaft of one brain, such that one character’s idiosyncratic point of view feels like the only possible way to see the world.
No, theater almost always spans an interaction, many interactions: between characters, between actors, between actor and space, between actor and audience.
That’s the joyful paradox of Marin Theatre Company’s “Jazz”: It succeeds most when it feels most like a novel — specifically Toni Morrison’s eponymous 1992 work, the source material for Nambi E. Kelley’s stage adaptation about a tragic love triangle set in Jazz Age Harlem.
At its best, the show, whose West Coast premiere opened Tuesday, April 30, translates that feeling of diving into a good book, where it’s as if you’re looking through the periscope of another set of eyeballs. Kelley
frequently plays out the same series of events twice in a row, as Violet (C. Kelly Wright) and Joe (Michael Gene Sullivan) meet cute back home in Virginia, then fall in love, then journey to start a new life in Harlem, then almost sit by helplessly as their early heady optimism disintegrates, poisoned by feelings denied.
Compare the two versions of the bumpy train ride north, when Violet, terrified by her pregnancy, steals away to induce an abortion with a cocktail of “soap, salt and castor oil.” From her perspective, Joe is blithely oblivious, too easily distracted, almost to the point of not caring about or fully seeing her. But then later, as the scenes replay, Joe’s point of view tells a different story. He’s creeping up to her door, wanting to offer something but afraid to begin. Does she want to know he knows? What exactly could he do for her, anyway?
Though director Awoye Timpo and her game cast can wring all these layers of meaning and tension from the text, these constant shifts in status from one silent look, it takes a long time for the play to cohere into something worth caring about.
The beginning of the show, at a funeral for Dorcas (Dezi Solèy), is a mess of still-inchoate impulses, hesitantly launched, then instantly and mysteriously abandoned. Before we’ve fully learned who Dorcas was and why it matters that she died, we’re instructed to grieve for someone else, Violet’s mother. Her suicide doesn’t get the narrative and character investment it needs to feel real, even though it supposedly — we’re told, not shown — motivates Violet’s aversion to having her own children. When a parrot (Paige Mayes) appears, you might wonder why, and the show can only answer, unsatisfactorily, “It’s OK; you’ll understand in about five more scenes.”
Actors, draped over set pieces with no apparent purpose for being onstage, seem to be marking time in their own isolated universes, rather than urgently and confidently connecting with each other and the show around them. Kimie Nishikawa’s set is as aggressively bland as a chain hotel’s lobby. Though Marcus Shelby’s original jazz music gives the show a cool, mournful vibe, it frequently drowns out the actors, and it’s too monotone, piping in the same riff in scenes that have vastly different moods. After a while, its insistent offbeat bass thuds become like noise from construction outside you have to distract yourself from in order to concentrate on the show.
And nuanced as the characters are, the show ends on a bizarre note, almost celebrating the death of Dorcas, Joe’s much younger mistress. It’s as if it’s no big deal that this young woman — a full human being with a rich character arc, with needs and desires, flaws and attributes — had to die at Joe’s hands so he and his wife could make another go at happilyever-after.
Earlier, she got to seize control of the storytelling for a while, just as a character in a novel frames a whole universe, giving her point of view an authority and depth uncommon for a play. But then she gets shrugged off, just as so much else in the show does.