2022 OnyxFest launches with two contrasting shows

Mari Evans: larger than life as she seemed to be in person

An advantage of seeing short plays by different writers on the same evening helps to highlight the pluses and minuses of OnyxFest, an annual festival of new work by black playwrights.

Back-to-back scheduling also allows the visitor to experience different views about what lifting up black voices in the theater means today: the festival's impactful title is "A Soulful Mosaic of Black Life on Stage."

The meanings can be intense and clearly expressed to the understanding, but also may be without a consistent and well-integrated address as to how good theater is felt on our pulses.

As opening night proceeded Thursday on the Basile Stage at IndyFringe Theater, allowances had to be made for a definite workshop feeling. Polished productions, both technically and artistically, might well have their place in the schedule through Nov. 12 (next weekend at IUPUI Campus Center Theater), but "Black Is My Color" and "A Noise in the Attic" are the only ones I'm able to attend.

"Black Is My Color" is Celeste Williams' multimedia way of holding up the admired cultural example of Mari Evans (1919-2017), an Ohioan by birth who called Indianapolis home from 1947 until her death. A multi-faceted author, she was both loyal to her adopted hometown and fiercely critical of its treatment of its black residents. Many of the excepts from her work that Williams uses focus particularly on the urban renewal that doomed the center of black life here, forever identified with Indiana Avenue. Progress toward desegregation must be assessed against the concurrent fracturing of a centered African-American community, in Evans' view.

Using a framework of dialogue between a couple of black women of different generations meeting in a coffeehouse, Williams has the older woman guide her troubled friend, using Evans as inspiration. The playwright then introduces an actress representing Evans to embody the poet's legacy. Crucially, the poet-essayist is presented through her wary regard for interviewers. She says outright that the exposure benefits only the interviewer and the media outlet represented, not her. But she relishes the opportunity to spread enlightenment, not just to vent.

Thursday's performances had pauses in the presentation that could not readily be understood as intentional. Were Evans' silences meant to be seen as her deliberate attempt to have what she's just said sink in, as calculated resonance? I wasn't sure. Some slight delays were in the slide projections, some in the music, some in the voice-over excerpts. I suspect more of a continuous flow is essential to the design of "Black Is My Color."

The choreography, carried out by two young women dancers, was a useful theatrical touch, fleshing out Evans' seated monologues with a visual, active representation of her narrative's significance. Musical underlining was provided by recorded excerpts from Premium Blend recordings. Everything seemed intended to be well-knit, and I felt the production was credibly tending in that direction. What came through was a kind of lecture-demonstration that could be of benefit both in and out of local schools. 

The second play, by festival director Vernon A. Williams, is a kind of family drama enfolding two contrasting love stories. One of them falls apart under the stresses and temptation of a rise in status for an upwardly mobile attorney-politician heading a fractious Carmel family. He's dealing, not too smartly, with keeping the peace between his teenage daughter and her stepmother, his wife. He's also got a romantic involvement on the side that could threaten his rise in the world.

"A Noise in the Attic" makes reference to a disturbance that has both real and symbolic meaning: A homeless man with large entertainment ambitions, sidelined by the pandemic,  has surreptitiously taken up residence in the attic, and hears everything that's going on. Some of what he learns is news to the wife, with whom he shares an affinity for creative work. At first she doesn't have much to rely on except a lively female friend's loyalty and advice.

The play has a clear-cut trajectory designed to work toward a happy ending. The signals along the way are perhaps too obvious. The writing is so brisk and detailed that perhaps the cast was encouraged to spill all their lines in rapid profusion. That's a familiar flaw in some undercooked theatrical productions, where the actors apparently forget that audiences are hearing for the first time speeches that are thoroughly familiar to the players. 

Variety of pacing would have been welcome. That includes a long episode in which the wife has just discovered the interloper and is holding a gun on him. His hands are raised the whole time he tells his story. The scene feels static, despite the tension. You come to believe that the woman would not ever fire that gun.

Nonetheless, Williams is thoroughly invested in his characters and their conflicts. You sense that as a writer he wants the audience to take certain things they say at face value, other things ironically. The relative anomaly of black people in Carmel is one source of irony; another is the disparity between the interloper's desperation and his hold over the family as an attentive eavesdropper. 

Ancient playwrights sometimes solved their plot tangles with a deus ex machina — a "god from the machine," a contrivance to make things come out right on the down-to-earth level. The noise in the attic is alluded to as a suspected rodent at the start, but here turns out to be a resourceful young man engineering the entire action as he ascends the ladder to stardom.