`Brand New Shoes' steps out again in Suisun City
Vallejo's Tia Madison reprises one-woman show about historically significant Black American women on Saturday at Suisun Harbor Theatre
She's added Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama, stretching her one-woman show, “Brand New Shoes,” to two acts of sketches about historically significant Black American women.
But with those additions, Barbara Jordan, the famed civil rights leaders and Texas congresswoman who spoke eloquently during the Nixon-era Watergate hearings in the 1970s, had to be set aside, says Tia Madison, the play's author and a professor of communications studies at Napa Valley College.
Yet Madison's piece, which runs nearly 90 minutes, still includes the vignettes she created 22 years ago while a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, and refined in later years: Impressions of Rosa Parks, Katherine Dunham, Maya Angelou, Dorothy Dandridge, Mary McLeod Bethune and Marian Anderson.
A Vallejo resident, Madison, who will reprise her show for two performances on Saturday at Suisun Harbor Theatre in Suisun City, said the sketches have evolved over time to reflect not only her increased theatrical skills but also the slings and arrows of life that come with getting older.
“I think the change is in me,” she said during a brief telephone interview Tuesday. “The characters are still the same. When it wrote it in 2000, I was young and didn't go through a lot of experiences. I believe the show has matured with me.”
Reviewed favorably in The Reporter when it opened well more than 15 years ago in Solano County, “Brand New Shoes” — which briefly delves into the women's lives through period costumes, song, dance, figurative language and history — is “a celebration, an evolution of shoes — not the ones you wear, but the ones that wear you,” Madison says as the play opens.
As she slips on a series of 10 1/2 AA shoes, she transforms herself into the famous women at key moments in their lives: Parks the civil rights pioneer; Angelou the poet; Dunham the famous choreographer; Anderson the opera diva; Bethune the educator; Dandridge the beautiful and troubled film actress; Winfrey, the American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, author, producer and philanthropist; and Obama, the lawyer and former first lady.
Most recently, Madison, 46 and the mother of two, performed the award-winning show (Sacramento Regional Theatre Alliance honors for outstanding original script and outstanding production of an original script) during Black History Month at Cal Maritime, the merchant marine academy, in Vallejo.
Besides earning a master's degree in theater, Madison earned a doctoral degree in curriculum and instruction from the University of Phoenix in 2013. Her dissertation was titled “A Qualitative Phenomenological Study of the Leadership Challenges in AfricanAmerican Retention Programs,” an effort, she wrote in an email to The Reporter, “to highlight the programs that address the achievement/opportunity gap” of African-American community college students “and the challenges that program leaders incur.”
The show's reprise comes amid major changes in America, from the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement to the rise of white supremacist groups nationwide and the Jan. 6, 2021, mob invasion of the U.S. Capitol to the increased number of Blacks in our halls of government and the publication of the 1619 Project, the latter a longform journalism project that reframes the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans in our nation's narrative.
As she and the play have matured, Madison has been approached by other actors to perform the show and she is considering publishing it, she said.
“I think it's time to share this work with other actors,” she said. “Over the years, I've wanted to be the actress to do it, but now I'm willing to share this work with other actors.”