A conversion experience

One of my favorite holiday traditions over the years has been reading about the changes in Penumbra’s Black Nativity. In 2008 it “radiated joy.” While in 2007 it was “a little fuzzy.” 2003 was a year off, and I hope the show spent it in Miami or on a nice cruise, though it must have stayed away from the buffet if it did, because it went away “overgrown” and came back “trimmed”— and it’s ironic that 2003 was a vacation year, since the experts announced that 2002 version had “gotten it right” for the first time since abandoning its “traditional version” in 1999 and was ready to “settle in as a new holiday standard.” Vintage 2000 was “like a pretty girl in her early—” something or other, a detail lost to the Pioneer Press’s Scrooge-like lust after cash. Let us draw the curtain here, as the vast form of Black Nativity past recedes into the mists of time and critical niggling, pelted with the ink-stained snowballs of memory. As my rhetorical stand-in for The Ghost of Christmas past, Black Nativity proved an excellent choice. It was certainly a play with a past, as they used to say in America about anyone who hadn’t been married for forty years to their junior high sweetheart. Black Nativity has been around. This was my first time to see it however. So I come to the show with an innocent eye, a hilarious idea in itself, rather like one of those movies where the main character is being attacked by his own hand. If one of my eyes were actually innocent, I can only imagine how out of place it would feel. But I digress, quickly, and look, here I am again. Let me begin by saying, as I say every morning on awakening, “Thank god I’m not a critic.” I don’t have to pretend that I have any idea where this year’s version of Black Nativity exists in relation to the Black Nativities of years gone by. I don’t have to pretend that the show has a plot. And, best of all, I don’t have to wonder when I’m going to be let go, moved to part-time, or asked to drop in on the Arabian horse show at the fairgrounds and deliver a snappy five hundred word piece on it for Sunday’s “Living” section. Yes, Virginia, Black Nativity has no plot. Reviews may have lead you to believe that the play tells the story of the Walker family, their encounter with an angel disguised as a homeless man, and their struggle to recover from the loss of a beloved relation. This is all true, to the same degree that Peanut M&M’s are an excellent source of protein. The dramatic structure of the play actually seems like the sort of thing a virtuosic theater director might undertake on a dare. Make a beautiful and moving theatrical experience that kind of tells a story, but you have to do it by stringing songs and dances together, using no dialogue or any of the useful conventions that might be adopted from a game of charades. As in, this scene is about, three words, begins with an “m”... The songs can’t be written to tell the story either, just collected, like “found art” and juxtaposed. Let’s hold for a minute though on the beautiful and moving part. It’s been said that the classic American musical moves into song and dance at the points where feeling overflows out of the events of the story. In Black Nativity it’s as if the parts where the feeling was not overflowing were gotten rid of, leaving a procession of powerful emotional vignettes, connected by images of family love, the story of the Nativity, and an occasional sprinkling of Santa stuff. Putting a plot into this thing would just be a drag on the whole enterprise, besides necessitating the removal of at least three or four great songs. You don’t want that. The singers and dancers in Black Nativity are so uniformly wonderful that it’s silly to even try to single anybody out. The show begs for one of those ensemble awards they give to whole casts. Musically, it’s hard to imagine these songs being more moving, more skillfully delivered, or more filled with soul. And the brief dances seem to be simply the same exuberant joy that pours out of the singers translated into motion. So if you’re wanting your cockles warmed, and what could be more appropriate to this brutally cold and dark season than roasting hot cockles, Black Nativity is a true straight shot of that old time Christmas feeling, with the Christ right up front. In fact, as a professional heathen, I unexpectedly found myself thinking of Keats’ assertion, “beauty is truth, truth beauty” while watching Black Nativity. Which for me, makes the show a resounding success as a gospel musical, on the gospel as well as the musical front. I’m not converting; I’m just sayin. . . Of course, my next stop on my holiday binge is The Klingon Christmas Carol. So, for now, let’s just wait and see if I come away from that one believing in The Federation.