Confident "Evidence" fleshes out shadowsRohan Preston, Minneapolis Star TribunePublished April 20, 2003 Skulking around the half-darkened stage, Zell Miller III whispers and rants, extending his verbal ballistics with arms that move like semaphores, with sassy bare feet ready to kick out if necessary. The Texas playwright, poet and actor is like a puma ready to purr or pounce, haunting the Pillsbury House Theatre stage with quicksilver ferocity. Then he smiles, and everything seems easy-going again as he confidently delivers his self-penned two-person hip-hop theater piece, "The Evidence of Silence Broken." This eruptive work, which opened Friday to ecstatic ululations in Minneapolis, is composed of episodic poems and vignettes. They reveal a brash, vulnerable young man coming into flesh from shadows, a writer wetting his voice where there had been only dry silence, a mind coming into sharp consciousness. "Evidence" bears a loose biographical narrative -- of Miller's strong parents and the devastation that follows their divorce; of his courtship of his wife, and the young son who gives him the kinds of pleasurable resistance he gave his parents. The one-act also is about a young man's coming of age as an artist. He quotes favorite writers John Keats, Jack Kerouac and Nikki Giovanni, and humanists Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. What makes the show so thrilling is Miller's passionate performance, which includes him rapping, doing a death dance and speaking in tones often associated with Shakespearean actors. He is aided by brilliant deejay and instrumentmaker Kitundu, who plays tintinnabulary dancehall reggae riddims on his own harp and turntable hybrid instrument. Together, they string the disparate pieces into a vibrant, multicolored necklace. Director Daniel Alexander Jones has found many ways to animate and elevate the pieces in "Evidence," which are forceful sometimes, then quietly spiritual. He is a very intelligent director whose choices bring points into high relief. But Miller's performance is made somewhat treacherous because he moves in the dark, and the stage has so many objects on which he can trip. (He stubbed his toes a few times on opening night.) And the slow book-ends of the show seem a touch self-indulgent. The action takes place in Seitu Jones' graffiti-and discard-strewn set, where nearly two dozen variegated light bulbs hang like eyes suspended from strings. (One has a clown face painted on.) The bulbs behave like mood setters as Miller switches them on and off, accessing rooms onstage and in his psyche in a show that is surprisingly and confidently multidirectional. |
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