All of Andrea Hairston's plays are about the same thing. That's not a criticism. Over 30 years, her work with Chrysalis Theatre has formed an interconnected series of pieces that converge in recurring themes: violence, racism, women's strength, the mind-poison of commercialism, the desperate need for community, the healing and revolutionary power of art and imagination.
Hairston's work insistently searches for signs that foolish humanity can overcome its divisions and oppressions (both external and self-inflicted) and work together creatively. The plays are loose-jointed tapestries of scruffy-poetic text, homemade music, dance and whacky humor. In them, chaos and despair are forged into fragile hope through sweat, idealism and cussedness.
Dispatches, the latest in the series, has all these ingredients, not least an insistent faith in the liberating potential of common action. At this historic juncture, it's impossible not to see it in the context of the wave of hope surrounding that community organizer and his audacious triumph. Here too, the cry is "Yes, we can!"
This production features Chrysalis regulars Greg Alexander, Dana Blackburn, Sylvia Boston-Johnson, James Emery, Joy Voeth and Pan Morigan, whose original vocal and instrumental music provides a flowing underscore. Also in the cast are poet/performer Lenelle Moise, Smith College professor Bill Peterson and Smith students Itoro Udofia, Kathryn Dhillon, Melissa King and Stephanie Miller. The production's design includes masks and felt art by Beth Beede and tapestries by Micala Sidore.
Subtitled "A Sci-Fi Carnival Jam," Dispatches takes place at a busy urban intersection. This is a metaphorical crossroads too, of course, where lives collide, dreams and reality merge, and subatomic laws apply. (Hairston was trained as a scientist, and there's usually a thematic nod to quantum theory, like the Uncertainty Principle, which states, more or less, that the more you try to pin down something in motion, the more unpredictable it becomes.)
This crossroads of the universe is watched over by a talking traffic light that takes ironic note of the random comings and goings. The bustle of street life is a typical cross-section of Chrysalis characters: freaks and outcasts, rebels and crazies, African spirits and spirited African-Americans, dreamers and aliens—both alienated humans and an actual space creature.
A young poet poised to make it big is in danger of blowing her first TV appearance because she's lost her daughter, a willful child who is hiding from her among the street people. The poet's mother, also a writer, gets the notes for her memoir mixed up with flyers that rain down from the sky advertising a free trip to the cosmos. Another artist, a painter, is trying to catch a flight out of this crazy country, while a war-weary medevac helicopter pilot is trying to give up flying but keeps turning into a hummingbird flying backward.
The Space Monster is trying to get away too, back to his home planet, but meanwhile he's adopted what he figures is an appropriate camouflage disguise—a swaggering Texan. There are also multiple griots—African musician-storytellers and keepers of the collective unconscious—and several embodiments of Eshu, the Yoruba trickster-spirit of the crossroads. One of these is a homeless soul carrying a sign, "Will do magic for small change."
And then there are swarms of ants and bacteria, those indispensable atoms of the ecosystem. The ants are warriors that wage mindless pitched battles—as the stoplight observes, "If ants had big bombs, the world would be a burnt cinder." The bioluminescent bacteria swarm around scooping up the trash, and at one point try to abandon earth to take that cosmic vacation promised in the flyers.
Yes, Dispatches is as chaotic as this sounds, but that's part of the Chrysalis trajectory: a world, a community, in crisis and confusion, struggling to shape a collective purpose out of diversity and find a compass point away from the wreckage at the crossroads.
I got to go down to the water, to the fire,
to whatever element that will wake my soul up.
No time to waste—It's a hot mess out here.
Freaks don't just haunt the night,
we're Day Walkers out there in power suits or cruising on Nike Air.
Violence is a video game—bomb a nation, don't feel a thing.
Everybody need to wake the fuck up from this Zombie Jamboree…
Get down to the water, to the fire,
get up in arms,
take back the day and the airwaves too,
throw down, get down,
trouble the water 'til it's a movement, a tidal wave,
turn this mess around.
Quiet as it has been kept, we ain't over yet!
—from Dispatches, by Andrea Hairston
Dispatches: preview Jan. 29, performances Jan. 30-31, 8 p.m., free (but the Griots will pass the hat), Hallie Flanagan Studio Theatre, Smith College, Green Street, Northampton, reservations at 585-ARTS (2787), www.smith.edu/smitharts.
