Olivia's Opus is a one-woman show, a dramatic monologue in the truest sense of the word. It is an hour and 20 minutes thick with language, narrative, and movement. Framed in a series of remembrances from birth to the age of 16, Olivia's tale is told on a tiny, spare stage, which at times represents the interior of her home, sometimes the lower middle-class neighborhood somewhere near the Mason-Dixon line. As the first play written by veteran actress Nora Cole, who until this South Florida debut has been the only actress to perform it, it's a solid, fairly compelling narrative, although at times the language is a bit uneven. There are brassy, ballsy, Ntozake Shange moments ("I don't have to do anything but be black and die!") mixed in with some pretty flat, "Dear Diary"- type sentiments: "Remember when you realized that your parents weren't perfect?" But the real issue here is that the theme, coming of age during the civil rights era, seems so overdone as to be almost unpalatable.
In the hands of the M Ensemble, however, which performs out of a storefront in North Miami, the tired story gets a revitalized lift. Amazingly, with Reid as Olivia at the helm, we are happy to be steered back to the '60s accompanied by Stevie Wonder and news clips of Walter Cronkite announcing Kennedy's assassination, because Olivia as a character is believable and compelling. She is tall, thin, and gawky with Pippi Longstocking braids. Her tag sticks out from the back of her T-shirt. She puts blobs of lightning bug goo on her fingers and pretends they are jewels. She prays to have arches in her feet so her ballet instructor will notice her. She prays for forgiveness for her earlier request that all her brothers and sisters would die so that she could be alone with mom and dad. And she pauses during prayer to scratch her rear end. This voice is combined with an older, more mature one that narrates a sexy, sizzling, summer "quarter" party and an outraged one that thunders back at an omnipotent, judgmental god she has been raised to obey.
One of the most compelling moments comes when Olivia has a conversation with her other self, a sort of superego with a voice that is a combination of Chris Rock and Esther from Sanford and Son (that purse-slinging, Bible-bludgeoning Esther: "You going to hell, you fish-eyed fool!") Olivia reminisces, "Remember when Dee ran away from home because he thought he was white?" And the raspy voice snaps back, "Yeah, and when he found out he was black he came back, didn't he?" Her performance creates what writer Miller Williams calls "the sympathetic contract" -- the willingness of the reader to follow a character because of the character's verisimilitude.
Reid has a wide voice range, and she uses it effectively -- a critical detail for a one-woman performance. As a child Olivia's voice is high-pitched with a black country accent: "Mama!" she cries, running around the stage in a frenetic circle, up the stairs and through the audience with the hysteria of any young girl who arrives home terrorized by some hair-pulling classmate. In depicting Olivia as a young woman, Reid's voice loses the high-pitched tone and most of the accent and becomes much slower and more deliberate.
Occasionally Reid steps out of her character briefly and comments to the audience, a technique which, because it is used subtly and sparingly, adds humor to the often serious dramatic narrative. At one point when Olivia is calling out for a relative, she stops, turns to the audience, and informs us: "That's black for Mary Lou." Later she pauses in the middle of a heated love-hate dialogue with herself on the subject of nappy hair and declares: "Dreads aren't here yet." In a similar discussion about skin color, she comments, "'Black is beautiful' hasn't arrived yet."
Besides the development of Olivia's character, Reid uses her talents to give us glimpses of the central figures in Olivia's world: her Southern black mother with her righteous, don't-talk-back-to-me voice trying to keep her eight children out of trouble; Crazy Dave, local radio personality and pervert; the girls from the neighborhood, gasping and gossiping about who won't be going back to school in the fall "because they bellies swelled up." This variety of voices and accents doesn't create a Sybil or Lily Tomlin effect here. She switches seamlessly and organically; everything flows from the central character, preserving the dramatic monologue form.
Then there is Reid's use of her body, for which director Jones should be given some credit. In a scene that follows a disturbing sexual experience, the lights dim and the song "Time Takes the Tears Away" (sung by playwright Nora Cole) comes on. Reid performs a series of movements that could not be called dance or even an actor's interpretation of a young girl dancing alone in her room. They are a deliberate, almost robotic series of movements (remember synchronized swimming?) that contain a sort of lyrical, dreamlike quality, but are completely void of any kind of grace, sensuality, or even physicality. These moves seem more like abstract representations of memory than interpretations -- a welcome break in almost an hour and a half of solid narration. They don't really add dimension to the character, but they do to the work itself.
Though there's always a risk when coupling multimedia with theater, the music and news clips in Olivia's Opus never overshadow Reid's monologue, the result of Jones' subtle touch. Jones worked on the first production of the play with Cole and has long been active in the National Black Theater Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, from which the M Ensemble has been picking up a number of its productions. Jones made a smart choice in not having Olivia speak about or react to the news clips. They exist within the play as they would for a child in that time period. Kennedy's assassination and brutal clips of the Watts riots are sandwiched between the dreamy, awkwardly executed moves of a flat-footed black girl who is invisible to her ballet instructor and the outraged adolescent who is scandalized when she catches her mother smoking a cigarette on her break at work.
We have seen these clips in history classes, movies, and video collages. Their black-and-white graininess and gravelly sound can still make them compelling in the right context. Ditto the era's music. When juxtaposed with Reid's portrayal of Olivia, the result is neither didactic nor clichéd. That's not an easy task to pull off, but it provides a good reason to venture down to the tiny theater that has done just that.
