Lou, the first character to take the stage in Spell #7, tells the audience his unpredictable behavior is best explained by his father’s profession: magician. But in 1958, Lou explains, his father retired from magic after a child asked whether he could turn the boy from black to white. “His father said no, no magician could do that,” director Ron Himes says. “His father tried to impart to the young boy that you are colored, but you should love it. You should love being colored. There is magic in your blackness.”
Ntozake Shange’s Spell #7, staged by The Black Rep, follows Lou, himself a magician at the moment of the narrative, as he tries to instill his father’s message in the black artists who gather at a St. Louis bar. It’s the 1970s, and race, Himes says, “impacts their lives in terms of the opportunity they’re given, the types of roles that are offered to them, and how they think people in the industry perceive black artists.”
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The ensemble cast carries the plot through poetic soliloquies, music, and movement—traits of a choreopoem, a term coined by Shange to describe her piece For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf. After producing For Colored Girls at Washington University, Himes added Spell #7 to The Black Rep’s season of “Civil Rights, Identity and Soul” to honor the playwright, who died in 2018.
The message of Spell #7 resonates with Himes. “Not many plays today are written in a way that looks at the impact of minstrelsy on black artists and the damaging effects of the images that have been perpetuated throughout hundreds of years,” he says. He first directed the work for The Black Rep in the ’80s, but in this run, he says, “there will be a lot more movement and choreography.” The director also wants to foster understanding in 2020 audiences: “I am hoping that they will look at black artists differently… I’m very interested in unpacking how artists continue to survive in spite of the negativity, in spite of the images, to look at the reality that black artists are forced to have to live with in terms of how they approach their craft and celebrate their culture.”
Spell #7 runs February 19–March 8 at the A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre.
More to See
Ghost at The Grandel Theatre
Young-adult fiction author Jason Reynolds writes for kids who can’t breathe. That metaphor appears in his novel Ghost, a finalist for a National Book Award, in the sport of running. Castle “Ghost” Crenshaw is a young man who’s turned to the sport after a traumatic experience and his father’s incarceration. Ghost crashes a track practice, and a coach sees his natural talent and encourages him to join the school’s track and field team. “At first, he’s in danger of being one of the lost children. He continues to run, but now he’s running with purpose,” says Julia Flood, artistic director of Metro Theater Company. This month, the company, with the Nashville Children’s Theatre, debuts the novel’s theatrical adaptation by Idris Goodwin, author of And in This Corner: Cassius Clay. “When I read the book, I just thought, This is exactly what young people today are dealing with,” Flood says, “this feeling of trying to push through and have your life get on a good path when there’s obstacles all along the way.” It’s a story about finding family and finding community, she adds, and the characters’ struggles reflect much of what today’s middle-schoolers experience. “It’s really about: Are you going to be running toward what you want to be, or are you always going to be running away?”
Metro Theater Company stages Ghost at The Grandel Theatre February 2–March 1.
