“Forever” Taps The Roots Of Theater

Veteran stage director Neel Keller had never directed a one-actor, close-to-the-bone autobiographical solo show. Until this season.

The result: Dael Orlandersmith​’s Forever, debuting at Long Wharf on Wednesday and running until Feb. 1, digs down to the roots of theater. It’s elemental storytelling that connects us all, no matter how different we may be.

When that kind of storytelling is done right, the charge generated is the same, says Keller — whether around a prehistoric campfire, at an amphitheater in Sophocles’s Athens, on a porch in rural South Carolina, or in Forever.

The frame is a visit by Orlandersmith to Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. The sojourn triggers a coming to terms with her mother, who neglected her to the point of abuse. There were too many men and too much booze in her mother’s life, and she was unhelpful, to put it charitably, when her daughter was brutally raped. Yet she also was an aspiring and frustrated artist whose spirit Orlandersmith credits for launching her on a career in spoken-word poetry and theater.

For Forever, the Long Wharf stage is bare except for two reading desks and 65 family photographs. Is the person who narrates the story Orlandersmith herself? Or is she the actor Orlandersmith playing the character Orlandersmith, whom the playwright Orlandersmith has brought alive through memory and artifice?

Is a memory created and shaped or recorded and recalled? Is Forever a play or an unadulterated, though artfully shaped, autobiography? When the lights go down, does the difference affect the audience — or how a director directs?

Before last Friday’s rehearsal, Keller had a sip of his coffee, threw the end of the gray scarf around his neck over a shoulder, closed his eyes, and pondered the questions.

“It’s not a play like we think of it,” Keller said. ​“It’s ​‘I have a story to share with you.’ Your personal life is nothing like this, but because you’re human, things here will resonate. That’s the magic of simple storytelling.”

Keller first encountered Orlandersmith when she was reciting her poetry in New York City in the 1980s. He followed her playwriting career carefully, which always had material on race and other matters close to the bone. Yet the material was always done through characters Orlandersmith wrote — that is, created and performed.

After Keller saw a recent piece, Black ​’N Blue Boys/Broken Men, done at the Berkeley Rep two years ago, he was struck not just by how interested the audience was in the play. ​“They also wanted to know who Dael is. Who this person is who knows so much about rock and roll” — and who had made the journey she has.

Writing in the ​“Dreaded First Person”
Over drinks that night, Orlandersmith told Keller she’d seen a documentary about Pere Lachaise and had made a pilgrimage there to visit the graves of Jim Morrison, Richard Wright, Oscar Wilde, and other members of an artistic family she increasingly felt herself part of. She wanted to adapt the film as her next project.

Keller listened and then suggested there might be a better way to go about it. ​“We talked about the cemetery in South Carolina where her mother is buried,” he said. They settled on telling Orlandersmith’s own and her mother’s story. ​“It’d be a truly autobiographical one-person show.”

“Do you mean write in the dreaded first person?” Orlandersmith said.

“Yes, that’s the next step in your writing,” Keller said, ​“because the audience was interested in the person who acted those roles.”

Thus Forever was born. Center Theater Group (CTG) in Los Angeles, where Keller is one of the artistic movers and shakers, had commissioned a piece from Orlandersmith, and this was going to be it.

Over the next two years, Orlandersmith sent Keller diary and other autobiographical materials. He and Joy Meads at CTG served as dramaturges and helped Orlandersmith order and shape her material. Because the material is deeply moving and psychologically searing, Orlandersmith had to go on a difficult, demanding journey into herself.

“The process of writing became part of the piece,” said Keller. ​“In order to write she literally had to unlock doors; she had to discuss probably things she had hid.”

Keller said he loves spending time in the company of writers like Orlandersmith and Lucy Alibar, another playwright whose autobiographical solo show Throw Me On The Burnpile And Light Me Up is next up for Keller at MASS MoCa in the spring.

Their work, like the stories Keller heard on South Carolina porches as a kid, are ​“always tinged with a certain mixture of the magical, fact and fiction, to explain the inexplicable.”

So who is up there on the stage, the person Orlandersmith or the writer and actress of her story?

“She is Dael in the story of Dael,” Keller said. ​“She’s both Dael and Dael telling us her story … of Dael, of a character who is shaped by the psychological impact of events. In parts she has hindsight, in parts she’s there in the moment.”

There’s also a coup de theatre at the end of the play. But Keller wouldn’t give away what it was.

Forever runs at the Long Wharf from Wednesday until Feb 1.