Playwright's Own Story

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The average middle-aged American has lived through astonishingly rapid social change. Civil rights movements have uprooted corrupt political systems and brought security to people who used to live in fear. Higher education has expanded beyond a narrow elite. The structure of society no longer depends on -- in fact it deplores -- the orderly confines of having everyone "know his place." These facts are so overarching that we tend to take them for granted, but they are inherently more dramatic than the domestic squabbles and psychological revelations at the heart of most U.S. theater. It is the daring, and impressively achieved, ambition of Endesha Ida Mae Holland to make this arc of change the subject of a single play and to illuminate it all in the more-or-less true story of one black woman: herself.

From the Mississippi Delta, which opened off-Broadway last week after extensive regional tryouts, blends folktales, childhood memories, salty down- home sociological observations and blues and gospel standards with Holland's unabashed "confessions." Raped in childhood, a prostitute as a teenager, she eventually earned a Ph.D. and now teaches American studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The first act, about the world she came from, is diffuse, as much panorama as autobiography. The second is more tightly personal, yet it too derives from the oldest notion of the theater -- as pure storytelling. Three stunningly gifted women describe and enact the many characters. Sybil Walker excels in sly and sassy moments, Jacqueline Williams in raucous and unaffected ones, and Cheryl Lynn Bruce radiates quiet strength. They share roles, including that of the author, with a fluidity that makes an extremely theatrical event seem natural and engagingly offhand.

At the center is the writer's bond with her mother, an uneducated but adept midwife who, in vintage American style, inspired her children to make something of themselves by seizing opportunities she never had. Her foibles and uproarious back-country ways are evoked unflinchingly but without disrespect. It is a measure of Holland's gifts (and of Bruce's acting) that the mother never seems a plaster saint, even when she is a true martyr -- fatally burned in a house fire that was apparently retaliation for the daughter's civil rights activism.

Holland's talents shine in the scenes of her rape, on her 11th birthday by a white town elder, and her mother's murder. She has an infallible ear for the emotional pace of a scene, letting the horror be just blunt enough for just long enough, then segueing into the release of laughter. She finds the right detail: the raped child from the shacks eyeing an exquisite carved bouquet on the banister as she struggles back downstairs; dogs sniffing at a patch of the mother's burnt skin scraped onto the sidewalk. Her dialogue can jolt the audience with the unexpected, sometimes twice within a few words: just after her rape, the girl regains pride by scorning childish pleasures, saying she feels she is "a woman now -- an old woman." And she utterly avoids self- pity. Instead this unforgettable play is steeped in the writer's, her mother's and her region's jubilant zest for life.