Something special happens when young performers flood a stage — when, after a sizable ensemble has already amassed, still another wave moves in, testing a proscenium’s bounds.
It’s a paean to theater’s simple powers to make magic of bodies in space. It’s bustle and abundance, but also hope, especially after a time when crowding has been forbidden.
All that happens before San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Company even gets much chance to flex. But the whole of “I, Too, Sing America,” which opened Friday, Jan. 28, at Brava Theater with 26 performers — some as young as 15 — is a jolt of positive energy. And it’s so sincerely and thoughtfully envisioned that audiences might feel as if they’ve quaffed from the fountain of youth.
The idea for the show — a collection of poems by artists of color enlivened with original song and dance — sprang in part from co-creator Othello Jefferson’s ritual of reading Black poetry to his two daughters, Olivia and Isabella, now 6 and 4. Another motivation was that Jamie Yuen-Shore, one of multiple SFBATCO artists who were students of Jefferson’s at Young People’s Teen Musical Theatre Company, wanted to make a show with him.
“他是最鼓舞人心的和不可思议的音乐director,” she recounted in a group interview. “We really took it for granted because we were high schoolers.” Only as an adult, did Yuen-Shore, now 30, and SFBATCO fully realize, “Oh my God, ‘Othello’ is amazing.”
The group had two main criteria in selecting poems for the show.
“At first, it was really easy to have a bunch of really sad poems,” Yuen-Shore recalled. Eventually she realized, “This is not our statement about being a person of color. That’s not my experience of life.”
Additionally, choreographer Christine Chung pointed out, addressing Yuen-Shore, “The poems you were attracted to weren’t about that person’s identity. They happen to be Black or queer or Latin, but it wasn’t about that; it was just about their wedding or their mom.”
The current run is the show’s third since 2018, and the modular format of “I, Too” — with some poems coming in and out based on individual performers’ affinities — lends itself to repeat visits. If, for 2022, that means the set list doesn’t always have a clear arc, the components themselves are sterling.
Take the show’s version of the poem “Beehive” by Jean Toomer. Jefferson’s harmonies are so complex and moody, and so meticulously blended, that the chorus almost becomes a new, multiheaded being where each vocal section brings out the others’ best.
Or “Komorebi” by Marissa Bergmann (who is also a performer in the show). Chung’s choreography, in which performers gently pat the stage, as if to encourage a seed to sprout from the earth, creates a sacred space; it’s the the kind of movement that slows time down to the speed of a poem, banishing your mental scurry so that you’re ready to receive its words.
Then there’s the almost corporeal power of individual voices.
Naté the Soulsanger can carry the full range of human emotion in a mere entrance, then hyper-focus it all into a single note. Jocelyn Thompson-Jordan carries a booster pack of vocal power in secret reserve; just when you think a solo has scaled the limits of human capacity, she leaps farther still.
To give these poems the time and attention they deserve is both to revel in their lusciousness and weep for their beauty. There’s the title poem, Langston Hughes’ masterpiece, exquisitely rendered by company co-founder Rodney Earl Jackson Jr. It seethes with barely contained rage only to switch registers, in Jefferson’s apt score, the way the sun banishes storm clouds, as the narrator envisions a tomorrow that we still, to our shame, haven’t achieved.
Among the most moving pieces is “In Daddy’s Arms,” a poem by Folami Abiade, sung by four Black men.
“In my daddy’s arms the moon is close,” they say. Then: “I am strong and dark like him.”
How often, you might wonder, do our stages depict positive images of Black masculinity and fatherhood? In a way, this poem answers the clarion call of Hughes’.
“Tomorrow, I’ll be at the table,” the Harlem Renaissance poet wrote. “In Daddy’s Arms” sets a place and offers a chair.
N“I, Too, Sing America”:Created by Othello Jefferson and Jamie Yuen-Shore. Concept and music by Othello Jefferson. Directed by Jamie Yuen-Shore. Through Feb. 13. 90 minutes. $15-$40. Brava Theater, 2781 24th St., S.F.415-484-8566.www.sfbatco.org