Soul Repairs: A multicultural tribute
Anne Knauf
Issue date: 9/26/02 Section: Arts
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Andrea Hairston's "Soul Repairs" is the story of the death of a powerful man and the suicide of his more powerful wife. In the wake of a bombing, a woman prepares to jump, her daughter reconciles herself to her tumultuous relationship with her parents and her girlfriend, and a worker desperately tries to repair a bridge. Such is the bare plot of "Soul Repairs," a complex drama of interwoven stories, falsehoods and truths set in the ambiguous turf of 2013 on the interface between progress and the primitive, peace and warfare, cacophony and quiet, the gross reality of grief, and the simplicity of a funeral. The ambiguity and paradoxical quality of the show's time and events are highlighted by the dissonant music, which at times melds together with the voices of actors and the clanking of the bridge and sometimes threatens to drown the audience in its expressive, cacophonous grief.
In the opening music, a prophetic voice reads: "The walls of his village were part ancient and part twentieth century" in a heady, mellow beat that could have come from an African village or the streets of New York. The actors entered in a procession — the ceremonial solemnity interrupted by two others, who revealed thematic tensions in their casual glances and gulps from a water bottle. Water indicates an intersection of different periods in the show where at times it represents the fragmented quality of today's society and at others the refreshing source of life.
The dramatically juxtaposed time periods in "Soul Repairs" lends force and drama to such themes as memory and the passage of time. Toward the end of the show, the repairman epitomizes every character's scarred obsession with the past: "I remember
every face I see, and that's a curse, not a syndrome." The forces of the present moment and memory clash when the mother's obsession with the past, both its myths and its painfully remembered truths, won't allow her to have a future. Her daughter Bea claims always to live in the present but cannot understand the past. "We all gotta get over these wounds or we live in the past," says Bea. The gap between their perspectives and approaches to life is so wide it is like the two platforms that are at the constant focus of the show, the ideal and the realistic, too wide to be breached or even explored in the generous two and a half hour run of the show.
There is also the history and the present of a people to reconcile, and that isn't easy with the predator planted firmly and not about to leave. The characters are not only obsessed and embittered with their own messy past, but dwell on their race as well. They are enslaved in the racial tension of this era of terrorism just as firmly and to the same debilitating effect as the blacks and whites in antebellum American south. And, with some irony, they can achieve freedom only through connection, break bonds of hate only by forming them through love.
In the opening music, a prophetic voice reads: "The walls of his village were part ancient and part twentieth century" in a heady, mellow beat that could have come from an African village or the streets of New York. The actors entered in a procession — the ceremonial solemnity interrupted by two others, who revealed thematic tensions in their casual glances and gulps from a water bottle. Water indicates an intersection of different periods in the show where at times it represents the fragmented quality of today's society and at others the refreshing source of life.
The dramatically juxtaposed time periods in "Soul Repairs" lends force and drama to such themes as memory and the passage of time. Toward the end of the show, the repairman epitomizes every character's scarred obsession with the past: "I remember
every face I see, and that's a curse, not a syndrome." The forces of the present moment and memory clash when the mother's obsession with the past, both its myths and its painfully remembered truths, won't allow her to have a future. Her daughter Bea claims always to live in the present but cannot understand the past. "We all gotta get over these wounds or we live in the past," says Bea. The gap between their perspectives and approaches to life is so wide it is like the two platforms that are at the constant focus of the show, the ideal and the realistic, too wide to be breached or even explored in the generous two and a half hour run of the show.
There is also the history and the present of a people to reconcile, and that isn't easy with the predator planted firmly and not about to leave. The characters are not only obsessed and embittered with their own messy past, but dwell on their race as well. They are enslaved in the racial tension of this era of terrorism just as firmly and to the same debilitating effect as the blacks and whites in antebellum American south. And, with some irony, they can achieve freedom only through connection, break bonds of hate only by forming them through love.