Arts Listings

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others ... One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. 

—W. E. B. DuBois 

Playwright Tanya Barfield of Blue Door, which just opened at Berkeley Rep, quoted these lines of DuBois in an American Theatre magazine interview (reprinted in the Rep’s program), for which her protagonist’s dilemma is emblematic. Lewis (David Fonteno), a mathematics professor, opens the show saying, “I won’t go to the Million Man March—and my wife wants a divorce!” 

The audience laughs, and Lewis continues to tell of his loneliness during—and now after—his 25-year marriage, which his wife, who’s white, has told him made her lonely, too, that he cut himself off from his background, isn’t a whole person. Lewis compounds the issue: “I watch my wife leave, and I divorce myself from myself.” 

His reflections and insomnia provoke reveries in which his dead relations appear (all played by Teagle F. Bougere): great-grandfather Simon, Simon’s son Jesse, Lewis’ brother Rex, communing with him, telling him their stories (which he’s heard, but forgotten or blocked out, having known all but Jesse), challenging him. Lewis questions who his intended audience would be, whose theirs is ... but they are talking to him, just as his own stories show that he’s been talking to the white establishment at his school in his head. 

Bougere fluidly slips in and out of character, spanning a century and more of black history—of American history—in vignettes inspired by research into WPA interviews and other oral accounts, his actor’s persona allowing the dead to speak, their experience to coalesce in one living, moving body. And Fonteno, struggling with it all as Lewis, is the witness in this two-man show. He’s a witness who finally enacts the part of his own drunken, later rejected, father, beating his younger self, the young Lewis as played by Bougere. This leads the mathematician (author of a book on “the repudiation of time” as incidents unconnected with the present, who was put on mandatory sabbatical because he insulted a black student he misunderstood as saying “house nigger” to him rather than “Heidegger”) to experience a kind of epiphany. He realizes the bond between himself and his father, and with their forebears, who endured, suffering the outrages of slavery, Jim Crow, lynch law and attempted assimilation.  

“White people try; black people fail!” shouted Lewis’ father on “the day he stopped singing.” 

The playwright has also written songs for the show, which are remarkably effective, authentic sounding pieces well-delivered mostly by Bougere. They accent the lyrical quality of a script that ambitiously strives, through its dual character of reflection and of storytelling, to do in one evening what August Wilson aimed at, on a different scale, in his life’s work, the series of plays that covers the African-American experience, generation by generation. 

This quest is ably fleshed out by the excellence of the two actors, directed with care and inspiration by noted actor Delroy Lindo, an Oakland resident. Set and lighting design (Kate Edmunds and Kathy Perkins, respectively) complement the mathematical and literary themes that underpin Lewis’s reveries with a curved ramp that descends to his easy chair, offset by a bookcase that reaches to the stars. 

The admirable objectives of Blue Door are undermined, however, by an unfinished, even glib quality to the construction of the script, which never rises above a “bitty” collection of vignettes, in one sense parodying Lewis’s compartmentalized conception of Time, in another sense a touch melodramatic. The lyricism that describes the events of the stories often renders them more symbolic than original, as the ending demonstrates. And the volume of research undertaken for the background of the stories can’t explain historical improbabilities in their telling, like a slave learning how to read by (apparently) reciting Moby Dick or being told a poem by Emily Dickinson, neither of which was much read (Dickinson was essentially unpublished) until many years later. 

Given amplitude by its fine acting and direction, its songs and its crucial sense of humor (sometimes a salutary, dry humor), it’s unfortunate that the thoughtful playwright met in the interview in the program didn’t take the references (and gestures toward) the self-consciousness of characters and audience further, in a real Pirandellian sense, bringing her reflectiveness, which parallels Lewis’s, into the heart of the play, going deeper into the contradictions between the stubborn memory of oppression and the wish to stand alone, start anew—and discover “that sense of the opposite ... what you find instead of what you expect to find,” as Pirandello himself defined Humor. 

Photograph: Kevin Berne 

David Fonteno and Teagle F. Bourgere star in Berkeley Rep’s Blue Door, directed by Delroy Lindo.