Theater without walls

Last night at Yerba Buena: Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s Living Word Project – Red, Black and GREEN: A Blues.

We took BART into the city, one of those rare, warm Indian summer evenings in San Francisco, not a chill in the air. Little did we know there was a Cal football event happening at AT&T Park, so the trains are full to capacity with acne-faced, beer breathing coeds sporting blue and gold.

The walk from Market Street to the theater is stunning with the urban activity of the day morphing into an evening calm, the colors of the sky slowly muting as the lights of the city pierce the dusk. The round windowed disc of the Modern Art Museum shines like a concrete-rimmed moon. The outdoor tables scattered across the tiered patio of Yerba Buena are full of Friday night revelers.

The anteroom of the theater is packed and the audience waits just outside the double doors, ready for the show. As we enter, we’re ushered towards the stage where four small wooden sets are arranged in a square shape, adorned with metal sculpture and stapled fabric, each decorated in a different style. Four actors, three men and one woman, move among the sets, one sitting on a makeshift porch banging a washtub, one reaching to the sky in an improvised string of movements. Another leans against a painted beam and sings, low-throated, a plaintive gospel song. The audience walks slowly from set to set, taking in the living sculpture. It is theater without walls; the art in you and you in the art.

And then we take our seats and the multilayered landscape comes to life, the sets are wheeled into a multitude of configurations, and the actors leap, wail, twirl, and preach. Environmental activism meets hip hop jazz in your face poetry slamming. A human percussion. A hybrid activism.

Belief is breathing.

In the span of an hour, Bamuthi speaks to us of his attempts to ground the Green movement in the hood; of bringing a reconfigured racial perspective to Green politics. I am enthralled, entranced, grief-stricken, guilty, uplifted. A passionately viable message joined to an equally passionate, equally viable new art form.

I got peace, like a river, in my soul.