'A Boy and His Soul' and 'Aftermath' captivate
Photo credit: Carol Rosegg | Colman Domingo displays a very split personality in "A Boy and His Soul."
WHAT "A Boy and his Soul"
WHERE Vineyard Theatre, 108 E. 15th St.
INFO $55; 212-353-0303; vineyardtheatre.org
BOTTOM LINE Marvelous soul-bearing
Forget how weary we are of autobiographical solos, forget the limitations of their form and the inevitable redundance of all those heartfelt coming-of-age stories.
Colman Domingo's "A Boy and His Soul" makes every one of them fresh and new again- even the coming-out phone call to his doting mother. This is a marvelous 90-minute tragicomedy, which just happens to be told by one astonishing actor/dancer/
singer, who brings his entire family - and friends of families - to life in his long, spidery bones.
Domingo created three irrepressibly original characters in the musical "Passing Strange" on Broadway. Clearly, those were just a start. He begins here with a simple bit of information: "My parents were selling the house I grew up in." He then burrows into the meaning of that life-marker through the nerve endings of the '70s and '80s soul music that galvanized his family life.
He rummages through the LPs and eight-tracks left in the inner-city Philadelphia house. Each song cues memories that Domingo and director Tony Kelly refuse to turn mawkish. In hairpin changes of character and mood, the actor manages to be wicked, tender, outrageous and profound. And, every so often, a disco ball twinkles from a cardboard packing box. Lovely touch.
Refugee tales from Iraq
WHAT "Aftermath"
WHERE New York Theatre Workshop, 79 E. 4th St.
INFO $65; 212-239-6200; telecharge.com
BOTTOM LINE powerful Iraqi testimony
It is safe to say that Jessica Blank and her husband, Erik Jensen, changed the conversation about the death penalty in "The Exonerated," their 2002 docudrama based on interviews with wrongly convicted prisoners. One can only hope that comparable attention will be generated by "Aftermath," the wrenching 85-minute drama sculpted from interviews with Iraqi refugees in Jordan.
Although rotating casts of stars performed "Exonerated," this piece is aptly played by actors of Middle Eastern descent. The stories of four individuals and two couples are told on a stage decorated with living-room chairs. Fajer Al-Kaisi holds the fragments of stories together as translator. The feelings these stories roil are, inevitably, mixed with sadness, fury, guilt and fear. An imam tells of being tortured by Americans in Abu Ghraib. "There is a price that your children will pay, unfortunately, to our children," he says with powerful simplicity. "There are mistakes for which apologies are not enough."
