alking
through your hat is supposed to mean you're hiding something or making something
up. But the women of Regina Taylor's delightfully celebratory new play,
"Crowns," will tell you just the opposite, that their hats are who they are,
that their hats are the truth.
Their songs and stories, which are largely about the experience of churchgoing black women in the South, make a strong case for the hat as a primary symbol of their self-expression, as well as of the pride, beauty and endurance of black women everywhere.
The show, which opened last night at the Second Stage Theater, was adapted for the stage by Ms. Taylor from "Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats," a book of photographs of behatted women by Michael Cunningham and interviews with them by Craig Marberry. She has added a skeletal story: After her brother is shot on the streets of Brooklyn, Yolonda, a high-school girl, is sent by her mother to live with her grandmother in South Carolina. There, in an alien, seemingly unhip culture that she initially disdains, Yolonda learns from her grandmother and her friends a thing or two about hats and black women and faith and herself.
But it is evident that Ms. Taylor's idea is wholly theatrical, not just textual, for she has directed her own work here with savvy and without flash and cast it flawlessly. The score — mostly spirituals and gospel songs, with some original music by David Pleasant, the show's flamboyant, onstage percussionist — gives "Crowns" a singular sound in the New York theater. And the monologues and musical numbers flow easily but not formulaically.
The anecdotes are varied and generally amusing. They take in hat etiquette. ("Don't nobody borrow my hats.") Hat propriety. ("For starters, a hat's height should be proportionate to your body. If half of you looks like hat, I'd say that's a problem.") And hat vanity. ("You can flirt with a fan in your hand, turn it this way and that. You can flirt holding a cigarette, too. But a woman can really flirt with a hat.")
But more important, there are hat memories, that is, important events in which hats played a significant part: the funeral of a woman who wanted to be buried in a hat; the purchase of a hat at a store that once refused service to blacks; the blind woman who nonetheless taught her daughter to read ("I'd tell my mother 'bout how a letter of the alphabet was shaped, and she'd tell me what it was") and who "liked to put her hat on by herself, but she looked to you to straighten it out for her."
The staging calls for members of the ensemble mostly to be hanging around with a purpose, stepping up to sing and dance and speechify, not to mention modeling their lovely hats (by Emilio Sosa) and flashing an attitude — or a "hattitude," as one of them puts it. (The definition of hattitude: "Something you have to possess in order to wear a hat well.")
On Riccardo Hernández's simple set, whose most prominent features are soaring vertical hatracks on either side of the stage and a door on the back wall that opens like a closet, Ms. Taylor has created a show that seems to arise out of spontaneous combustion, as if a bevy of department-store customers simultaneously decided to stage a revival meeting in the changing room.
And what a clientele! In addition to Carmen Ruby Floyd as Yolonda, the women of the cast include Harriet D. Foy, Lynda Gravátt, Janet Hubert, Ebony Jo-Ann and Lillias White, a distaff ensemble as warm, vibrant, tough and winning as any other you can name. And in their headwear, striped, veiled or brightly colored, with broad, jauntily angled or even removable brims, adorned by white roses or peacock feathers ("I look for a hat with the right amount of stuff on it"), they look just gorgeous.
Their voices share an earthy power. Ms. Foy (someone should write a show for her) has an especially unusual vocal tone, a kind of melodic lowing that gives her voice the fetching swagger to match her stage presence. Ms. White, the popular Tony-winner, exercises some serious vocal gymnastics in the service of both music and comedy. But every one of these women can muscle a song. And they are joined by Lawrence Clayton, who plays several male characters and who, as a preacher, at one point belts out "Touch the Hem of His Garment," a bluesy gospel tune by Sam Cooke that stops the show.
Finally, what comes across in "Crowns" is the sense of authenticity; like Yolonda, you feel that you've been transported to someplace real and welcomed there. In the theater, that's heady stuff.
CROWNS
Written and directed by Regina Taylor; based on the book by Michael Cunningham
and Craig Marberry; choreography by Ronald K. Brown; music direction and
arrangements by Linda Twine; set by Riccardo Hern.andez; costumes by Emilio
Sosa; lighting by Robert Perry; sound by Darron L. West; additional arrangements
by David Pleasant and Carl MaultsBy; production stage manager, Alison Cote;
stage manager, Amy Patricia Stern. Associate artistic director, Christopher
Burney; general manager, C. Barrack Evans; production manager, Peter J. Davis.
Presented by Second Stage Theater, Carole Rothman, artistic director; Carol
Fishman, managing director, in association with the McCarter Theater Center. At
307 West 43rd Street, Clinton.
WITH: Lawrence Clayton (Man), Carmen Ruby Floyd (Yolonda), Harriett D. Foy (Jeanette), Lynda Graváatt (Mabel), Janet Hubert (Wanda), Ebony Jo-Ann (Mother Shaw) and Lillias White (Velma).