Stoop Stories

Stoop Stories
Dael Orlandersmith
Thursday, January 10, 2008

This short performance of compelling short persona pieces is clearly unfinished, a “work-in-progress” as stated in the UTR guide. I admit, I was skeptical about attending an in progress piece—but once I settled into the seat and took one look at the joyous, pain-ridden, happy, broken, and etched face of Ms. Orlandersmith, I was hooked. She spun tales of lost dreams, truncated ambition, long lost glory, drugs, racism and the internal pain of disability. With each new scene, her face morphed into the character, her lips wide one character, tightly closed the next. Her eyes open wide in wonder as she performed in a child’s voice, and in the next, as she rocked back and forth in a fighter’s stance, her eyes squinted against an unfulfilled past and a future beset with nothing but heartache. The best of the lot she saved for last, as she took on the persona of a Holocaust survivor transplanted to New York, a man named Herman. Herman reminisces about a time when he met Billy Holiday at a club he frequented named Connie’s. Orlandersmith’s impression is spot-on, distilling down this man’s socially unacceptable desires and troubled history into a beautiful grimace of nostalgia and lost love.

Scott McEachern
UTR Press Corps
PICA
scott@pica.org