B-SIDE MYSELF
Breathes there a soul who hasn’t sung along with a favorite album? And, ah, if the songs we sing were rare and challenging and related to one’s life, we might have all approached The Wooster Group’s Kate Valk, as Eric Berryman did with his 1965 Elektra recording Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons, with a request to channel the album so that a new generation could hear it. And thus was born The B-Side, the powerful and moving hour of theater (or Record Album Interpretation) in which Berryman and his cohorts, Jasper McGruder and Philip Moore, bring pulsing life to the music that spins inside their heads as the exceptionally talented Berryman listens through his head phones.
The full hour is stunning, but it’s the work songs — “Move Along, ‘Gator” and “Rattler” and “Forty-Four Hammers” — that fill REDCAT with harsh and fragrant memory. In giving voice to the prisoners immersed in their bold interpretations of the material on the album, we might even be encouraged to search out the album for ourselves. Theater doesn’t often avail itself of such valuable causes.
And Ms. Valk, who directed Early Shaker Spirituals (which I never saw but which inspired Berryman to seek out Valk), was a perfect choice to direct. She works simply and with great clarity and understands so well a unifying force of the Wooster Group that dates back to Spaulding Gray’s holding a copy of the LP of T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party in his introduction to Nayatt School, the first play in his trilogy, Three Places in Rhode Island. The link between the past and the present have always been part of the aesthetic of this great theater company. But they have not always got to the heart of the matter as they do in The B-Side.
photos by and Steven Gunther and Bruce Jackson
The B-Side: “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons”
A Record Album Interpretation
The Wooster Group
reviewed at REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater)
631 West 2nd St (under Disney Hall)
ends on February 3, 2019
for tickets, call 213-972-8001 or visit REDCAT
for more info, visit The Wooster Group
