Dael Orlandersmith’s back at Long Wharf Stage II, and it feels like she never left. She’s sharing uncomfortable truths, but she’s comfortable here.
In the back pages of the program book for Forever, Orlandersmith, the show’s performer and playwright, can be found on a list of prominent writers who’ve had multiple shows staged at Long Wharf Theatre. (The show runs through the end of the month.) Shakespeare’s had ten of his plays done there, Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller nine each. Athol Fugard, Henrik Ibsen, Tennessee Williams, and Anton Chekhov are tied at seven. Dael Orlandersmith is next on the list with five, a number she shares with Noel Coward and A.R. Gurney.
It’s nice to see a black female playwright on par with two of the whitest, well-bred, status-obsessed playwrights of the last century. But Orlandersmith has another interesting distinction on this list: All her plays have been performed at the Long Wharf’s smaller Stage II space. That includes The Gimmick in 1999, Yellowman in 2002, and her collaboration with David Cale, The Blue Album, in 2007. Long Wharf also produced Orlandersmith’s racial-identity youth drama My Red Hand, My Black Hand, which toured New Haven public schools in 2001.
Is keeping Orlandersmith in Stage II the theater’s own form of ghettoization? Not in this case: Orlandersmith’s work is so personal, so intimate, so preternaturally calm and composed, that a bigger performance space would only be a distraction. She can get loud and angry, and certainly has reason to do so. But Forever is nevertheless a quiet, still, reflective show.
Autobiography With A Soundtrack
Orlandersmith has starred in most of the plays she has written, and Forever is perhaps the most autobiographical of any of them. It revisits familiar themes from her other works. She talks, as she did in The Gimmick, of growing up in the ghetto. She references, as she did in Yellow Man, inspirational literature. She dances, as she did in The Blue Album, to some of her favorite music. Her main musical muses in Forever are Jim Morrison and Patti Smith, but Orlandersmith mentions dozens of other musicians, artists, and poets who helped ground her during some horrific times in her childhood.
Much of the play concerns Orlandersmith’s relationship with her mother, and her tales of frustration, anger, resentment, despair, and remorse, presented in such a one-sided way, can start to seem whiny. The show’s simplistic framework — it begins with Orlandersmith recalling a visit to the Cimetiere du Père Lachaise in Paris, where everyone from Morrison and Oscar Wilde to Chopin and Beaumarchais are buried — doesn’t flow neatly with the urban New York drama that Forever becomes. As the heart of the story is Orlandersmith’s development as a human being and an artist, the show loses power whenever the focus shifts to other people or places.
But Forever’s riveting key scenes, including a description of a rape (which Orlandersmith delivers stock still in a chair) that erupts into a questioning of the existence of God, more than make up for any lack of fluidity. Likewise, Orlandersmith’s memories of her mother on her deathbed restore some balance and sympathy to the play’s portrayal of her.
As a sustained act of highly personalized storytelling, Forever lulls, surprises, horrifies, unsettles — and in the end, still leaves room for hope.
Stage II has become a welcome space for dramatized musings on creativity and mortality, including Athol Fugard’s The Shadow of the Hummingbird last year. Bringing Orlandersmith back to Long Wharf during the theater’s 50th anniversary is an acknowledgement that intimacy and understated eloquence will always have a place there.
Forever plays through Feb. 1 at Long Wharf Stage II, 222 Sargent Dr. (203) 787‑4282.
