Paris Davis Dean
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2005 - 103RD YEAR, NO. 29 - C2005 THE MIAMI HERALD - FINAL - 35 CENTS
ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT
THEATRE REVIEWS
Director adds polish to new troupe
BY BRETT O'BOURKE
Liberty City's got drama.
Not just the daily kind we all
live with, but - thanks in part
to the Celebrate One Stage
Theatre Repertory, which
staged it's debut performance
last weekend - the kind of
drama played out under hot
lights, to the applause of an
appreciative audience.
The fledgling group joins
the African-American Per
forming Arts Community The-
atre to the community.
Both groups make their per-
forming home in the Black Box
Theatre at the Carrie Meek
Cultural Arts Center.
For its debut performance,
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the theater's artistic director,
Stephen Ramon Gilmore,
staged both Say Young-
blood's Shakin' the Mess Outta
Misery and Paris and Michael
Dean's one-woman show,
Outliving the Scars On My Back.
Misery is about a girl's com-
ing of age in the 1960's South.
Daughter (Janay Harrison),
the motherless 25-year-old
narrator, says she was raised
by six "black woman surviving
with dignity." As she tells her
story, Daughter becomes 12
again, recounting lessons from
her "big mamas."
Doing away with plot and
character development, the
play unfolds in a series of
vignettes with each woman.
Topics range from the horrors
Misery and starts in her one woman show Outliving The Scars On My Back.
In Scars, Dean recounts her journey to self-realized womanhood.
Dean has been obsessed
from an early age with the desire for straight hair, a desire she says has been passed down since slavery. We follow her from her first straightenings in her mothers's kitchen to the blond wig she wore as an exotic dancer in order to pay for college to the barber's chair where she shaves it all off as a grown woman determined to define her identity and self-worth on her own terms
Dean's performance is
dand indignities visited upon
blacks by racist whites to the necessity of being able to provide for yourself, to being proud of who you are and where you come from.
Gilmore gets a nice effort from the cast of mostly novice actors. When all seven women are onstage at once, he does a good job of creating space and moving the actors through it fluidly. His work is also evi-dent in some of the more heated scenes where moments of silence are built into places the inexperienced actors would be unlikely to puth them on their own. The strongest performance is delivered by Paris Davis Dean, who plays Aunt Mae the strongest performance is delivered by Paris Davis Dean, who plays Aunt Mae in
delivered with the kind of passion, precision and natural beauty that brings more drama into everyday lives.