There is much to rave about in A Noise Within’s big-stage revival of August Wilson’s Gem Of The Ocean, not however its nearly three-hour running time and one particularly over-the-top performance.

The year is 1904, a mere four decades since the 13th Amendment put an end to 285 years of slavery, and legend has it that the Hill District’s Aunt Ester Tyler (Veralyn Jones) has been on this earth since the first slave ship arrived in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619.

It’s perhaps no wonder then that Aunt Ester’s has become the spiritual home of Pittsburgh’s African-American community and she its spiritual advisor, or that freshly-arrived Citizen Barlow (Evan Lewis Smith) has shown up at her doorstep for some spiritual healing only she can provide, if only he can get past Aunt Ester’s comely housekeeper Black Mary Wilks (Carolyn Ratteray) and her stalwart gatekeeper Eli (Alex Morris).

The young Alabamian, it turns out, isn’t the only black man in Pittsburgh to have met with trouble these past few days. A mill worker accused of stealing a bucket of nails has chosen death by drowning rather than confess to a crime he swore he did not commit, and the entire Hill District is up in arms.

The dead man’s coworkers have refused to report for work these past three days, a spontaneous walk-out that has prompted Black Mary’s constable brother Caesar (Chuma Gault) to arrest several of them and shoot another.

Talk about a town in turmoil.

 Completing Gem Of The Ocean’s cast of characters are Solly Two Kings (Kevin Jackson), a onetime Underground Railroad worker with sixty-two notches on his walking stick, one for each slave he “carried to freedom,” and Rutherford Selig (Bert Emmett), an older white traveling peddler for whom Aunt Ester’s is a frequent stop.

It takes most of Gem Of The Ocean’s very long first act for playwright Wilson to finally specify what has prompted Citizen’s guilt, during which time we have gotten to know the beautiful, educated Black Mary, groomed to become Aunt Ester’s successor; Solly, whose sister Eliza finds herself a virtual prisoner in an American South now doing its violent darnedest to prevent former slaves from escaping north; and Caesar, seen by the black community as having sold out to the white man and by himself as simply upholding the law.

Above all there is Aunt Ester, embodying centuries of pain and suffering and wisdom and compassion and strength, and Citizen, desperate for redemption and quite possibly destined for greatness.

If nothing else, Gem Of The Ocean serves as an informative Black History lesson, though with monolog after monolog taking up page after page of Wilson’s word-dense script, this is hardly the first time I’ve wished the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner had done some trimming, feelings that have grown stronger the more accustomed and attached I’ve become to ninety-minutes, no intermission, at which point Gem Of The Ocean still has another hour and a half to go.

It doesn’t help that a scenery-chewing Jackson bellows/shrieks Solly’s lines like an evangelical preacher on speed, the sole performance misstep in director Gregg T. Daniel’s otherwise terrific ensemble, from Jones’s wise and wizened Aunt Ester to Ratteray’s fiery, feminine Black Mary to Emmett’s ingratiatingly folksy Selig to Morris’s vigorous, vibrant Eli to Gault’s pigeonhole-defying Caesar, with highest marks awarded to Smith’s Citizen, heroic, vulnerable, and achingly real.

Scenic designer Stephanie Kerley Schwartz, costume designer Angela Balogh Calin, lighting designer Jean-Yves Tessier, and composer/sound designer Martin Carrillo do remarkable work throughout, and never more so than in a mystical Act Two voyage by slave ship to the mid-Atlantic City Of The Bones. (Makeup designer Shannon Hutchins, wig designer Shelia Dorn, and properties designer Shen Heckel merit their own kudos, as do choreographer Joyce Guy and dialect coach Andrea Ordinov.)

Dana Hunt is assistant director. Emily Lehrer is stage manager and Ashley Pantenberg is assistant stage manager. Bernard Addison, William Christian, Robert Hope Aaron Jennings, Rosney Mauger, Monica Parks, and Kacie Rogers are understudies.

Gem Of The Ocean has been assembled with such loving, respectful care that I wish I could give it unqualified praise. At the very least, it sheds informative light on African-American life half-a-century before Rosa Parks said “No” to giving up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus.

A Noise Within, 3352 East Foothill Blvd, Pasadena.
www.ANoiseWithin.org

–Steven Stanley
October 4, 2019
Photos: Craig Schwartz

Tags: A Noise Within, August Wilson, Los Angeles Theater Review