Ralph Harris' North Philly, and Robert Wilson's Challenge to the Way We Receive Stories

Attention-deficit art

Comments (0) By Steven Leigh Morris Monday, Oct 20 2008

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Depicting himself as a child, he re-enacts having to play “retarded” on the street in order to protect himself from being beaten up and robbed by the local gang. The performance is as rich as the writing: With telling details from the “wet money” he would always carry (from having to stuff dollar bills into his mouth as protection against being robbed), to catching ringworm in a local swimming pool, to his grandfather’s “sliding” dentures.

Harris moves on to those he bumped into along his journey into adulthood. He dons a silk scarf in order to inhabit his Aunt Betty, a woman in her 30s who seduced him as a youth. We watch that mesmerizing and deeply human seduction entirely through the lense of this gentle, lonely woman, so tenderly performed by Harris.

Keith J. Leman

He is his own grandpa: Ralph Williams as Alphonso “Pooh” Williams

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The show is constructed as a series of scenes that demarcate the eras of his youth. Through this dimension of Harris’ personal history, we meet the people who will gather for the birthday party. Uncle Feeva, for example, emerges as a striking portrait of a drug addict with an almost Chekhovian yearning to visit his own children and perhaps earn their respect.

In one scene, Harris conjures his estranged father from a time before the son was born: On the older man’s wedding day, Harris Sr. listens to the preacher state his bride’s middle name. In a revelatory detail, the bridegroom confesses he never knew his new wife’s middle name — the first pebble in what will turn into a very rocky marriage, rife with domestic violence as well as more muted manifestations of rage. This does raise the question of how Harris Jr. would have obtained that insight from his own father’s wedding day, a dramaturgical quibble in a haunting show in serious need of an editor, and possibly a dramaturge.

The play’s final portrait of Harris’ 94-year-old grandfather, facing down a gunman in the post office, is brilliant for its physical and vocal detail, as well as its blend of drama and wisdom. It’s the light around which the other stories flutter, yet it’s still a random source of the piece’s chaotic unity — perhaps because the grandfather has no interaction with Harris’ other characters.

North Philly is nonetheless a compassionate work in progress that offers a serious challenge to Robert Wilson’s theory that the jerky stop-start rhythms of familiar life don’t offer authentic truths about the way we move through time.

NORTH PHILLY | Written and performed by RALPH HARRIS | STELLA ADLER THEATRE, 6773 Hollywood Blvd., 2nd Floor, Hollywood | Wednesdays, 8 p.m., through December 17 | (323) 960-7612.