Seeing places

May is as good a month as any to dust off your matinee clothes

“The word theater itself comes from the Greeks—it means ‘the seeing place.’ It’s the place where people come to see a spiritual and social X-ray of their time. The theater was created to tell people the truth about life and the social situation.” —Stella Adler, 1983

In a TV- and movie-dominated culture, live theater gives a moment to experience rather than observe a story, to breathe in the same ideas and images other audience members and artists are absorbing or creating. As we endure the 24-hour news cycle and constant access to entertainment, it would do us good to heed Adler’s call to go to “the seeing place.”

The Tulsa area has over 15 active theater companies producing full-length, live productions. Tulsa is also privileged to be home to a variety of dance companies, improv troupes, and other outlets for live storytelling. Our theater and dance scene is populated by artists and companies telling stories with themes of sociopolitical engagement, liberation, and disenfranchisement—and who are seeking to question longstanding cultural structures in society, family, and government. Tulsa’s performance artists are busy inspecting our past with an eye on the future, grounding it in a sense of time and place for our community today.

Take an evening’s pause to learn “the truth about the social situation.” There’s a bounty of options and performance forms to choose from (see more listings at thetulsavoice.com). A show might be the salve for a busy week, life, or tumultuous time. If you’re feeling a little more lighthearted about your community engagement, the theater scene has you covered there, too, with children’s stories, musicals, and improv.

For now, here are four recommended performances for this month:

Signature Series 
University of Tulsa Lorton Performance Center
Tulsa Ballet | May 3–6

Consistently its most interesting show of the year, Tulsa Ballet’s Signature Series brings together three short works chosen to mix in a little bite with the regularly-scheduled beauty. This year, artistic director Marcello Angelini has picked pieces that will hit those less obvious pleasure receptors—ones that make you think as well as feel. “The Green Table” is a crucially important dance work from 1932 made by German choreographer Kurt Jooss in a bleak historical moment between two wars. It’s an archetypal warning about history repeating itself, made in a groundbreaking style that combines cool irony with forthright emotion. (One of Jooss’s students was the legendary Pina Bausch.) “Rassemblement” by Nacho Duato explores themes of disenfranchisement and liberation in a dynamic, passionate dance set to Haitian folk songs. A new work by TB resident choreographer Ma Cong (fresh off his Broadway debut in “M. Butterfly”) completes the evening. A ballet company that sees itself as part of—not set apart from—sociopolitical engagement? More of that, please.

Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play
Charles E. Norman Theatre
Theatre Tulsa | May 4–5, 11–13

Each of the three acts in this play takes place in the future, after an apocalyptic disaster. Fading memories of “The Simpsons” episodes and other 20th-century pop culture become the trade of traveling acting troupes. As time passes, those stories become myths and legends of the past and, eventually, the basis for new religions and culture. Comforting, innocuous stories mutate into outsized dogma. Come for golden-age “Simpsons” nostalgia; stay for the fall and rebirth of civilization.

Seascape
John H. Williams Theatre, Tulsa PAC
American Theatre Company
May 4–6, 10–12

The second of Edward Albee’s plays to win a Pulitzer Prize, 1975’s “Seascape” is also among the playwright’s most absurd works. The play focuses on the relationships of two couples: Nancy and Charlie, American soon-to-be retirees, and Leslie and Sarah, a pair of large lizards who talk and move like people and are considering leaving the sea for life on dry land. Conversations between the couples—each uncertain of just what lies ahead—reveal philosophical truths about relationships and understanding.

Alicia Hall Moran: Black Wall Street 
John H. Williams Theatre, Tulsa PAC
Choregus Productions | May 24

There can never be enough tellings and retellings of what happened to Black Wall Street in the 20th century, not just in Tulsa, but also nationwide. Silence perpetuates abuse. When history books make the evisceration of black affluence invisible, that means it can remain unseen when it happens today. There’s been a push in recent years to make this story heard, from Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey’s “Race Riot Suite” to Jennifer Latham’s hit young adult novel “Dreamland Burning.” Singer and composer Alicia Hall Moran, herself the daughter of a black financier, created this staged concert in collaboration with her husband, jazz pianist Jason Moran (artistic director of jazz at the Kennedy Center) and historian Gene Alexander Peters (co-director of the Slave Relic Museum in South Carolina). It’s a performance piece featuring Moran, a noted mezzo-soprano, and six musicians in a wide-ranging, many-layered exploration of the past, present, and future of money and blackness, drawing on sources including Black Enterprise Magazine from the 1980s, studies of 18th-century New York, and documents from the Tulsa Race Riot in 1921.