YOUNG LOVE: Dent and Jacquet. |
The Etymology of Bird, the world premiere being staged by the Providence Black Repertory Company through May 18, is not about jazz legend Charlie Parker, but it certainly does soar and transport us.
Billed as an urban love story, this tale by Zakiyyah Alexander is at once gritty and lyrical, full of punchy rap lyrics and a moving but unsentimental storyline. As impressively, under the direction of the company’s associate director Megan Sandberg-Zakian, the ensemble weaves together a gorgeously performed theater experience that ranks among the best at any off-Trinity stage in this or any recent season.
Precipitated by one of those senseless but common shootings of a black youth by a cop in New York City a few years ago, the play establishes a steamy summer backdrop where such things could happen. More importantly, it creates vivid backgrounds for all of the characters affected — mainly the 16-year-old Juliet named Birdy and her 18-year-old Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbor Jermaine, who falls for her with Shakespearean resolve. They are played with energetic momentum and broad emotional range by Jonathan Dent and Fedna Jacquet.
A one-man chorus of movement rather than voice is provided by local hip-hop and breakdance wizard Sokeo Ros, a member of Everett Dance Theatre, who plays B-Boy. His liquid moves sometimes relate to the emotions of the characters who are speaking, but he is not acknowledged by anyone, so he seems more like a wordless spiritual presence. In Act Two people occasionally speak to him, if only to point out that nobody wants to pay attention to him, as if that weren’t their own state in the world.
Both Birdy and Jermaine are into words. (Etymology is the study of their origins.) She is building her vocabulary, collecting words much as she collects dozens of college catalogs from around the country, looking forward to escaping the impoverished and dangerous streets of Brooklyn. She lives with her sweetly protective grandfather, whom she calls Pop (Mishell Lilly), but her mother has gotten her life together in California and wants Birdy to come live with her. Her closest friend is the older Carmen (a firebrand Dahiana Torres), a romantic who keeps hoping that the next of her many lovers will be a keeper.
Most of the first half is taken up with Birdy and Jermaine hanging out with the others in the story as much as with each other, but their mutual romantic drift becomes obvious. Each comes to admire the other, to the point of feeling a little inferior, he because she’s so smart and she because his hip-hop raps are so good. His rhymes are everything to him, to the point that he doesn’t want to go to college yet, which distresses his fiercely protective mother, Rashida (Jackie Davis). He also gets admiring support from two street pals, the talkative Kash and the hip Doey, as Clayon McFarlane and Rudy Cabrera charm us with playful give and take.
Into this mix hesitantly struts Officer Anthony (Alexander Platt), a white housing cop new to the neighborhood and ignored, at best, whenever he wants to be friendly. When Doey responds to an amia-ble overture by cursing him, he and his friend get roughly rousted, and the rage on both sides could fuel a small riot.
