Psalmayene 24 and Jabari Exum in Dear Mapel — Photo: Chris Banks
A heartfelt ode to fathers and sons, finding your voice, and growing up hip-hop, Psalmayene 24’s epistolary drama Dear Mapel (★★★★☆) also profoundly honors the lost art of letter-writing. That distinctly direct and intimate mode of expressing what’s most deeply felt, and saying what often can’t be spoken, serves as Psalm’s chosen means of addressing the father he barely knew.
Via letters to Mapel, the award-winning performer and playwright vividly evokes his own coming-of-age enriched by art and music, while examining the main thing, or person, that went missing.
For this world premiere production, director and production designer Natsu Onoda Power engulfs Mosaic’s Sprenger Theatre stage in a sweeping deluge of paper missives. Dozens more balled-up sheets of paper litter the floor, stray thoughts rejected or reconsidered.
The setting suggests a flood of stories, emotions, unaired grievances, and unshared joys, more than could be contained in a thousand letters, or however many it might take for the writer to feel some sense of closure.
The calm center of the storm at his writing desk, Psalm admits that closure remains elusive. But, as he quotes his Jamaican granddad, “nothing beats a failure but a try.”
So the show — which opens with Psalm’s beautifully written “I Am” poem introducing himself as an “incorrigible, nonconformist Jamerican…fly-ass motherfucker” — constitutes a powerful attempt to reach someone who can no longer respond. Though perhaps Mapel, as much as the audience, can still somehow receive the message.
That metal writing desk, the only piece of furniture onstage, turns out to be quite the adaptable supporting player as Psalm enacts fond reminiscences of growing up in Brooklyn, losing his virginity, founding the dance troupe Subtle Motion while attending Howard U., and growing from aspiring actor to accomplished artist.
His truest support along the 90-minute journey is actor-percussionist Jabari Exum, also brilliantly adaptable, whether stepping in to play backup dancer, bandmate, or various other roles.
Most often, Exum, also known as Jabari DC, supplies inspiring musical accompaniment on drums and percussion, as Psalmayene brings to life his search for self, and for flagrant womanizer Mapel. Some stories register as pleas to his dad, who was barely around when Psalm was a kid, became estranged as Psalm reached adulthood, then died before the two could firmly put their differences to rest.
Other tales from his life — including a fateful turn on Amateur Night at the Apollo, and an eye-opening stint as the only Black cast member in a European touring company of Pinocchio — illustrate tests of character that he could only have faced alone.
Warmly open in his interactions with the audience, Psalm entertains as a storyteller, while also transmitting layers of pain and grief, with hints of regret but no bitterness. And he uses humor effectively to handle sensitive subjects like the overwhelming anxiety of a Black man trying to choose a watermelon in the supermarket without looking like a stereotype.
These well-chosen bits and passages tend to offer modest stakes, definitely more life lessons than life or death. But we already know what’s at stake for fathers and sons, and we can feel for this artist, now a devoted husband himself, what’s at stake for him in every letter, real and imagined.
The letters themselves are the conversation and its record, poignant reminders to speak what can be spoken while you have the chance.
Last seen onstage at Theater J putting a tender comic stamp on the remarkable Ruth K. Westheimer in Becoming Dr. Ruth, Naomi Jacobson displays impressive range portraying a very different feisty older lady in José Rivera's thought-provoking Your Name Means Dream.
Rivera -- noted for plays Marisol and Cloud Tectonics, and his Academy Award-nominated screenplay for The Motorcycle Diaries -- directs the sci-fi drama exploring the relationship between Jacobson's 74-year-old spitfire Aislin and her AI service robot Stacy, played by Sara Koviak.
A robust fall/winter for dance in the DMV gives way to a lighter but still bountiful spring, with an impressive variety of utterly inviting events and performances to choose from -- from Decolonized Beatz Indigenous World Pride at Atlas Performing Arts, and international troupe Compañía Medusa exploring queer themes at Dance Place, to several collaborators melding tap dance with different genres of movement and music to keep us swinging all through the season.
ATLAS PERFORMING ARTS CENTER
1333 H St., NE
202-399-7993
www.atlasarts.org
Decolonized Beatz Indigenous World Pride -- Celebrating the work of Indigenous storytellers, organizers, and performers, the arts and performance series Decolonized Beatz brings Indigenous World Pride to Arena Stage (1101 6th St. NW) on May 30, and the next day to Atlas with music and dance performances, panel discussions, film screenings, a drag show featuring Lady Shug and Ritni Tears, and a closing dance party with beatz by DJ Rivolta Sata (6/1, Lang Theatre, free admission but registration required)
BALLETNOVA CENTER FOR DANCE
Putting the v-a-i-n in vanity project, writer-director Steve Balderson's Sex Love Venice might set records for solipsism in a queer indie protagonist, a category with an epic list of contenders.
But the film's hero Michael (David Bateman), lovelorn in L.A., takes the cake among gay movie leads whose entire world is presented as a series of interactions centered solely around him and his search for romance.
To friends Liza (Suzanna Akins) and Dave (Zaramok Bachok), Michael expresses his frustration with his life of casual hookups, revealed in flash-cuts to frank nude scenes, usually depicting a lack of enjoyment in one party or the other.
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