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.
Dear Mapel runs through Feb. 13 at Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H St. NE.
Video-on-demand production will be available for streaming Feb. 14 to 27.
Tickets for in-person performances are $68, and individual tickets for streaming are $40. Call 202-399-7993, ext. 2 or visit www.mosaictheater.org.
Is willowy Londoner Bella truly going mad, or is her enigmatic husband Jack carrying out a devious plot to convince her she's losing her mind? And if so, to what end? In modern terms, Bella is desperately pondering whether Jack is trying to gaslight her into thinking she's going insane.
The terminology and the plot of Johnna Wright and Patty Jamieson's Deceived, now at Everyman Theatre, derive from Patrick Hamilton's Victorian thriller Gas Light, which premiered in 1938, before being adapted into the Oscar-winning 1944 film Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman as distressed newlywed Paula.
About halfway through Jay Kelly, Noah Baumbach directs a love scene. I don't mean that there is a sex scene (those rarely appear in Baumbach's cinematic universe, except the mortifyingly awkward kind). I mean that Baumbach himself appears onscreen, in a wink-nod cameo, as a fictitious filmmaker, choreographing an intimate scene between our hero, Jay Kelly (played in flashback by Charlie Rowe), and an actress playing his wife (Eve Hewson), who becomes his real-life paramour, though not real real-life, but -- ah, who's to say what's real anyway?
Baumbach has never been the sort of director to place himself onscreen, but the indulgence fits with a certain metatextual thread in Jay Kelly, a wry Hollywood satire and wistful character study infused with the director's signature familial discord. Here is a film about making sense of your life when, as Jay puts it, "all my memories are movies"; a film about sifting through the thin thread that separates public persona and private identity. How much of your life is real when millions of people know and adore you for playing someone else? And what about the real family you neglected to pursue those celluloid dreams -- is it too late to make amends?
December 8 will be a big day for Cheyenne Jackson. That's when he'll take to the fabled stage at Carnegie Hall -- with his mother.
"This is a little scoop," he confides during a recent Zoom call. "My mom and my sister are going to join me on stage, and we're going to sing a trio. We haven't sung together in years. My mom, who's a retired widow living in Southern California, is going to get a gown on, get her hair done. It's going to be a family affair, and I'm so honored they're doing it. It's going to be so emotional."
The show, which Jackson says will feature "an incredible set list -- it's daunting, it's challenging," is deeply personal, reflecting "a lot of themes that come from my life."
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