Theatre in Review: Duat (Soho Rep at Connelly Theater)

	Daniel Alexander Jones. Photo: Julieta Cervantes.

In the first act of Duat, the performance artist Daniel Alexander Jones delves into his past, examining his family and contradiction-filled upbringing with a novelist's eye. In the second half he...well, I don't really know what he does. I can report that, having worked hard, and effectively, to establish a certain mood, Jones executes a sharp left turn, dragging the show into someplace altogether different. If I prefer the first part, it's because I'm a fan of coherence -- and, sitting there after intermission, I began to wonder if I hadn't wandered into the wrong theatre. Not even the arrival of Jomama Jones, the star's soul-diva alter ego, is enough to pull together this mishmash of memories, music, romance, and politics -- and I haven't even gotten to the gods of ancient Egypt yet.

The Egyptians practiced a form of ancestor worship and, in Duat, so does Jones; wandering around Arnulfo Maldonado's library set, accompanied by the talented young performers Jacques Gerard Colimon and Tenzin Gund-Morrow, who represent him at earlier points in his life, he explores the landscape of his past, a complex terrain defined in part by his status as a gay, biracial youth in Springfield, Massachusetts, in the 1970s and '80s. In a nod to the young Jones' fascination with pre-Christian Egyptian cosmology, the play's title evokes the Egyptian world of the dead; in many ways, the play is a voyage through Jones' personal Duat.

The memories are indelible and powerfully rendered. Jones speaks glowingly of the library that served his neighborhood, an establishment presided over by "Mrs. Sylvia Humphrey, immaculate in her starched and pressed cotton dresses, and Mrs. Bettye Webb, who strode in each morning looking like Lena Horne with frosted hair." He adds, "They tended the books like rare black flowers; portraits of great writers, artists, politicians on the walls...Dr. George Washington Carver, Mary McLeod Bethune, Florence Mills, Odetta, the sounds of jazz turn-tabling in the way back-back, I felt whole." He also pays tribute to the musical idols of his youth, when "ancient gods peered out from record covers. Stevie Wonder, the sun god, shone hotter than July. Marvin Gaye sailed into the afterlife, shattered into pieces. Nina Simone, the mourning witness. Tina Turner had the magic to bind the atoms of a broken life back together." In passages such as these, Duat has the vivid insight and lyricism of a classic prose memoir.

Jones also invokes his own ancestral gods, including a grandmother, Daisy, who discovered a lynched male relative hanging from a tree; Uncle Gus, "who was in the room when they killed Malcolm;" and Uncle Lou, who had "a painting of himself styled like Johnny Mathis," and whose homosexuality was ignored by his relatives. His white mother and black father are referenced in a photo taken in 1968, "barely a year after Loving v. Virginia," as well as the deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, with Richard Nixon about to enter the White House. "Mom and Dad? They just stood at the edge of the void and leapt," Jones says.

This legacy plays out in Jones' life in a hundred different ways. He is one of the few black kids designated as "an integrator," a burden no grade-schooler should be made to shoulder. In a bit of distinctively macabre humor, he explains how his conflict-ridden family was calmed by nightly news reports of the Jeffrey Dahmer case. And if most young people of his generation strayed far from home in order to pursue relationships, Jones spent one summer having a steamy affair with an old friend, who has come out to him slowly, in letters, over the course of a year.

For all the richness of the memories, the gorgeousness of the words, the first half of Duat ends on a sad, angry note, with Jones acknowledging that beyond the cocoon of his childhood, the world is marked by "black bodies shattered. Queer bodies under constant assault. Race war, class war. Public schools fucked, safety net nonexistent, libraries closing, bees vanishing, oceans dying." He asks, "Can we love the broken with all our hearts?"

It's a good question, and an answer of sorts arrives in the second half, which, if I have it right, is set in a classroom where Jomama Jones shows up to preside over a school pageant ostensibly devoted to flowers, but which is really a fantasia on themes of regeneration and self-affirmation. It's a ritual designed to dispel the horrors of racism and sexism, replacing them with a celebration of the individual. Once again, the Egyptians are evoked, including the "Abydos pageant play in ancient Egypt, everyone dressed up in their fiercest fashions to tell the story of that African god Osiris, who was shattered into pieces, then remembered and resurrected by Isis, the original ISIS." In this pageant, each of the participants -- all of them, except for Gund-Morrow, adults playing children -- assumes the identity of a different flower. It's a spoof of old-fashioned school productions, but with a message that is totally earnest: Everyone is beautiful in his or her own way.

This act has several charming things on offer: Jomama Jones, that Nina Simone-style diva-in-political-exile last seen at Soho Rep in 2012's Radiate, is always a pleasure to have around, whether counseling Gund-Morrow about his shyness ("I was a wallflower -- albeit a tall and irresistibly magnetic one") or uproariously recalling a long-ago Black History Month pageant: "We had five little Martin Luther King, Jrs. with drawn-on mustaches, reciting the same passage from the 'I Have A Dream' speech; three Harriet Tubmans running runaway slaves up and down the aisle of the auditorium, yelling 'Keep it low, don't look back, I've never lost a passenger'." She adds that the rest of the cast that day included "one angry little boy with a box of matches calling himself Nat Turner, but he froze onstage in front of the audience and nearly caught the curtain on fire. Thankfully, my little friend and rival, Tamika, who was one of the seven Sojourner Truths, whipped off her shawl and smothered the flames." Other compensations include an irresistible romance between Colimon and the charismatic Toussaint Jeanlouis and some attractive songs by Samora Pinderhughes, Bobby Halvorson, and Jones.

Most of the time, however, it all seems too fey and silly, as if, having painted a richly detailed mural, Jones decided to decorate it with smiley faces. Such helium-infused flower-power proceedings hardly seem like a suitable follow-up to the incisive first half. And the less specific Jones' writing becomes, the more it turns a lurid shade of purple: "With everything going on, in these serious times, one might be forgiven for wondering if this is some kind of afterlife, with its bizarre twists and turns, distortions, and fat, obscene demons spouting bile and groping at things." Where did the poetry go?

If the director, Will Davis, can't reconcile the show's opposing halves, he has cast the production well and maintains a warm, affable feeling throughout. In addition to Maldonado's set, which spills out into the house and features a major end-of-Act-I reveal, Solomon Weisbard's lighting ranges from noirish looks to splashy color washes, and Elisheba Ittoop's sound design includes a playlist of alluring vintage blues songs, in addition to providing natural-sounding reinforcement. Oana Botez's costumes include a smashing gown for Jomama and whimsical blue-and-pink paisley suits for the rest of the cast.

Most unfortunately, Jomama Jones has surprisingly little to do. She is Daniel Alexander Jones' most indelible creation but she doesn't appear until after intermission, and even then she drops out of the action for long stretches. She is his ace in the hole, a card he keeps forgetting to play. Is this any way to treat a star, even a fictional one? There are many, many fine things in Duat but, as it stands, they are in need of sorting out. -- David Barbour