It’s been three years to the day since Linus, a Black child, was killed by plainclothes police officers. But none of his family has been set free yet—not from any physical barrier, nor from their blinding grief or righteous yet futile rage.
In Aishah Rahman’s 1987 play “The Mojo and the Sayso,” if justice was ever a hope, it was a slim one, now long buried. The freedom the Benjamin family seeks is to love one another again.
Each character in the play, now in an Oakland Theater Project production that opened Sunday, June 5, channels his or her unrequited feeling into a false idol and tries and fails to convert the others to worship.
For Awilda (Paige Mayes), it’s a church led by a snake oil salesman of a pastor (Reginald Wilkins). For her husband, Acts (Dane Troy), it’s the car he’s been building in their living room out of junkyard scraps, the car whose metal tube outline ingeniously dominates Karla Hargrave’s set. As Acts tinkers on the vehicle throughout the show, he might hang gears and other parts by string to the contour, almost as if he’s trimming a Christmas tree or as if he’s literally pinning his hopes on a castle in the air.
For the couple’s surviving son, Blood (Stanley Hunt), the false idol is weapons. Every shadow and rustle is a threat to him now, and brandishing a handgun or a knife isn’t just his way of protecting home; it’s his way of being seen in it.
The poetic, probing play, directed byAyodele Nzinga,是锋利的fam的方式呢ily members can live right on top of each other without ever intersecting or seeing or hearing one another, and how sorrow and guilt and fury only further entrench that isolation. Even when the Benjamin family members finally cry out for connection with all the fire in their bellies, even as all sides want it, none can say so in a language the others understand.
但即使只有80分钟,经常演出languishes. A fight scene is so clumsily realized that it’s not clear if anyone onstage believes the weapon is real. It’s as if the only direction the performers got was to improvise and hope for the best when that scene rolls around. And Hunt’s Blood aimlessly drifts about and circles the stage to the point of distraction, like a blinking light that won’t turn off.
Turn your gaze instead to Mayes, whose performance here suggests she’s ready for the meatiest roles on the Bay Area’s most august stages. She moves with the crisp focus and expansive communicative power of a dancer. Her voice, which the script affords frequent, glorious opportunity to burst into song, can rip a hole in the air — one Troy’s Acts can almost walk through, but not quite.
Mayes shapes each moment she’s onstage with athletic prowess, intellectual precision and emotional clarity. Wherever she trains her blazing eyes, you know it’s the most important thing or person in the scene.
“The Mojo and the Sayso” needs Mayes’ remarkable talent and skill when, after one of the best reveals of true colors in Bay Area theater design history (the specifics must be kept vague for your full enjoyment), she must instantly give up on her beliefs in order to take her husband’s hand. Together, they all leap into a dreamland that, in the magic of the show, has burst through the walls of their home.
In our own era of police violence, the play’s finale reads as a special gift. One way we must insist that Black lives matter is to let families like the Benjamins dream impossible dreams and then pave their way to reality, if at first onstage, then everywhere else.
L“The Mojo and the Sayso”:Written by Aishah Rahman. Directed by Ayodele Nzinga. Through June 26. One hour, 40 minutes. $10-$52. Flax Art & Design, 1501 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Oakland.510-646-1126.https://oaklandtheaterproject.org