Tag Archives: Jermaine Nakia Lee

Sex, Drugs, Homophobia, and HIV Keep Today’s Youth in Turmoil

Review: Jermaine Nakia Lee’s A Walk in My Shoes

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By Perry Tannenbaum

After the Afro-American Cultural Center moved to Uptown Charlotte and became the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, I wondered whether I’d ever review a show at the old Attic Theatre again. In my early years on the job, I might climb the stairs at 401 Myers Street as many as three times each season to see such works as Bubbling Brown Sugar, Salomé, A Raisin in the Sun, or To Be Young, Gifted, and Black staged by Defoy Glenn and his GM Productions.

Nowadays, the old Afro-Am building functions as the Little Rock Community Development Center, taking advantage of a block-long entrance to their parking lot to change their address to 401 N. McDowell Street. As far as I know, Little Rock’s portfolio still doesn’t include theatre, so it’s fortunate for me that Jermaine Nakia Lee and the Johnson C Smith University C.H.I.P. Project decided to stage the premiere of Lee’s new A Walk in My Shoes at the Attic – especially since a workshop version of the musical had previously been presented on the JCSU campus in 2013.

Just walking up the flights of stairs to the Attic – and then, once inside the theater, walking down the steeply sloped orchestra section to the front row – brought back memories of Glenn and the stellar actors who once graced the Attic: Margaret Freeman, Wayne DeHart, Sandra Beckham Lewis, and Michael D. Lowe. The house was packed to near-capacity when I arrived, and it was instantly apparent, from the activity of the light booth to the functionality of the narrow seats, that Little Rock has kept the Attic in fine repair.

Still, fine repair and state-of-the-art are not the same. There is no roof in sight looking up, so there is no fly loft. Entrances must all come from backstage since there are no wings, and it’s obvious that the Attic wasn’t conceived with musicals in mind. The trio led by musical director Kevin Staley was lined up against the right-hand wall of the stage, visible to audience and actors alike throughout the performance. Staley’s other option, to camp upstage behind the Attic’s curtain, would have required a video setup to cue the cast, with one or more monitors facing the stage. Reality presumably collided with that possibility and quashed it.

Yet the budgetary constraints of the Lee/JCSU collaboration were still apparent from the moment the core members of the cast began to sing. To be heard above the band, all of them needed to be singing in the sweet spots of their range, so body mics wound up as the actual necessities that the budget couldn’t cover. Notwithstanding the artistic merits of Marius James’s freestanding mural, split and separated to opposite thirds of the stage, scenery was fairly rudimentary, usually rolled onstage by the crew and the players themselves. When the trouble-prone addict Maceo was hospitalized early in Act 2, they didn’t dare wheel him onstage already in the bed, sparking some unintended laughter from the crowd as he carefully climbed on.

Played by newcomer Quinn Marques, Maceo personifies the population that JCSU wanted to address when they first approached Lee and sought his help in applying for a federal grant: substance abusers who engage in risky sexual encounters. Before he climbed into that hospital bed, various scenes of A Walk in My Shoes gave ample evidence of Maceo snorting, shooting up, and drinking to excess. Maceo says that he would like to be up-close and sexual with longtime buddy Bonnie, but the effects of various drugs seemed to be tamping down his libido when it came time to take action, which enabled Bonnie to keep pushing him away. Bonnie, portrayed by newcomer Tiffanie McCall, hasn’t been straightforward with her friends, hiding the fact that she was born HIV-positive. Keeping her distance from Maceo was a responsible thing for Bonnie to do while she kept her HIV secret, but as the action unfolded, she learned another reason for maintaining restraint.

So it’s the transvestite Ms. Kara, portrayed with queenly gusto by newcomer Tara Anderson, who wound up drawing Maceo into dangerous sexual activity. She’s the member of the crew who is always flush with cash, earning it by running a escorting service online and on her handy cell phone. After taking a call from Marques (an unseen baddie, not the actor), Kara gets a warning from Travis, the supervisor at the LGBT center, that she shouldn’t be making assignations with this Marques. But divulging the fact that he was actually raped by Marques and his cronies would cost Travis his job, so he left that info out. As a result, Kara had no idea of what the full consequences would be when she cut Maceo into the action.

Completing the crew is Keon Sunkins as the local preacher’s closeted son, O’Neal. His troubled relationship with his homophobic dad and mom, Bishop Rutherford and First Lady Shirley Rutherford, was the first of four tableaus in the opening title song, but there really wasn’t any meaningful sequel until deep into Act 2. So Lee, who wrote the book as well as the music and score, missed an opportunity to fully develop what could have been his most significant character. As Lee said in his genial curtain speech, this is a “long-ass” show, so audience members may give up on ever returning to the church – or wonder why O’Neal doesn’t hang out with a secret boyfriend instead of refereeing Bonnie and Maceo’s squabbles.

Fortunately, Lee has made some important progress as both a writer and as a composer. Dialogue between Maceo, Bonnie, Kara, and O’Neal is far more natural than Lee’s previous musical, For the Love of Harlem, which introduced us to Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and other notables of the Harlem Renaissance. A former program director at the PowerHouse Project, where he counseled HIV-positive youth and other at-risk populations, Lee doesn’t always resist the impulse to giftwrap teachable moments for us or to double-underline the fact that the four besties and Travis are an ongoing support group for each other. He’s at his best when he keeps it real between the friends – and when his songs usher us into his musical world. Too often, Lee gave in to his penchant for writing soul ballads in For the Love of Harlem. There is more variety in A Walk in My Shoes – jazz, hip-hop, R&B, and gospel all get their turn – and more consistent quality. “I Will Never Leave Your Side,” closing Act 1, was the only letdown.

Stage directing isn’t Lee’s forte, and an inexperienced cast might have sustained more compelling dramatic tension in between songs with more detailed, nuanced, and polished guidance. In casting his production, Lee clearly got what he was looking for from a vocal perspective. Anderson and Marques scorched their “Trouble” duet at the LGBT. With co-composer Tyrone Jefferson, Lee has written a cluster of memorable songs for his more peripheral characters. Shuffling around with a teeming shopping cart, Kyran McShaw as the homeless Mr. Jimmy teaches the young folk a different beat with “Jazz,” scatting along the way.

After serving mostly as comic relief with her irresistible cooking, Gail Ford (an oasis of splendor when I last wrote her up at the Attic in the 1997 edition of Bubbling Brown Sugar) gets to cut loose at Maseo’s bedside with “Ms. Wynetta’s Lullaby” before blushingly receiving some rusty romantic moves from Mr. Jimmy. Among the younger players, Elijah Ali stands out as Travis, as a singer and an actor – a good thing, since he was charged with bringing Lee’s most moribund character to life.

When we finally return to the church, there’s plenty to see and hear. Following up her rousing sermon as the church’s First Lady Rutherford, Myrna J. Key-Parker struck up the most infectious song of the evening, “Wait Don’t Mean No.” I finished worrying whether Key-Parker’s bravura could be equaled, let alone topped, when the Bishop stood up to deliver his sermon, for Clifford Matthews, Jr., left no doubt. A gay senior pastor at the St. Luke’s Missionary Baptist Church in real life, Matthews spits fire and stomps thunder as the Bishop, quoting ominous Scripture into his son’s face after O’Neal has had the nerve to answer his father’s altar call for all those in the congregation suffering from the “affliction” of homosexuality.

Although it’s more compartmentalized than in most musicals I’ve seen, the dancing in A Walk was consistently topnotch. In addition to a trio of voguers, one of whom danced in high heels, there were two hip-hop artists to wow us. The Reliable Brothers, identical twins who were featured at the prestigious Breakin’ Convention dance festival, danced to poetry by L’Monique King. Although they are identical twins, the Reliables didn’t always dance identically, occasionally going their separate ways and occasionally partnering as they choreographed their own spots. The fascinating part was watching each the Brothers as they expressed King’s words with their bodies and gestures. There could be no doubt that Lee and King had plenty to say.

Drugs, Homophobia and HIV Collide in Lee’s New Musical

Preview of A Walk in My Shoes

By Perry Tannenbaum

Sunkins (from left) with Tara Anderson (who plays Ms. Kara), Tiffanie McCall (Bonnie), Quinn Marques (Maseo) and Elijah Ali (Travis).

 

Playwright, poet, actor, director, songwriter, and community activist – it’s no wonder that multi-talented Jermaine Nakia Lee was once hired a community center called the PowerHouse Project. Or that he would be premiering his second new musical in the past five seasons. The first one, For the Love of Harlem, spotlighting key figures of the Harlem Renaissance like Zora Neale Hurston and Countee Cullen, was popular enough in 2011 for On Q Productions that they reprised it in 2014.

You can understand why there would be a clamor, in the Black community and beyond, for a new Lee musical. But you might not have expected Lee’s new A Walk in My Shoes to focus on HIV/AIDS. Isn’t that so yesterday?

Not at all, Lee will tell you. “In NC and in the country, African-American and Latino 13-24 year-olds are disproportionately living with HIV/AIDS,” he says. “In Mecklenburg County, African-Americans make up 70% of all new HIV infections. In most metropolitan U.S. cities, two out of four Black gay men are living with HIV/AIDS. As a Black gay man, these statistics alarmed me to action.”

And he had more than statistics for expressing his alarm. Each of the major characters is based, singly or as a composite, on the clients Lee met as program manager at PowerHouse. Located across the street from Northwest School of the Arts on Beattie’s Ford Road, not far from Johnson C. Smith University, PowerHouse mostly serves “young adult queer men and women living on or below the poverty level,” according to Lee.

Funded by the Center for Disease Control, a primary PowerHouse function is offering free, rapid, and confidential HIV testing. A lot of juicy confidences came Lee’s way – as soon as he was hired.

“After my first month at PowerHouse,” he recalls. “I was so moved by the lives of my clients, I began writing songs about their experiences. Then that led to poetry. And that lead to the first draft of A Walk in My Shoes.”

All the key members of the My Shoes crew boast stories to sing about, though they’re not always happy tunes.

Bonnie was born with HIV, but she’s still keeping the secret from her three besties, one of whom is Maseo, who has developed a mad – and dangerous – crush on his childhood friend. Overachieving O’Neal is the closeted son of the beloved Pastor Rutherford, a staunch homophobe who gets a rude shock when he issues an altar call for those in his flock who are wrestling with the “Spirit of homosexuality.”

The most serious drama centers on the most sensational character, Ms. Kara. Lee describes her as “a transgender female who can slay you with her sharp tongue or her killer eye for fashion. Those designer digs are afforded by her latest venture, online escorting.”

Problem is, Ms. Kara has just set up a rendezvous with Marques, a bona fide charmer – and a dangerous sexual predator. Apparently, Marques is a bisexual with a ravenous appetite, so you can bet he drives plenty of the drama.

Johnson C. Smith U, co-producers of A Walk in My Shoes, approached Lee during his final year at PowerHouse to help them with a federal grant to draw attention to the correlation between substance abuse and risky sexual behavior. The grant came through just before Lee resigned in 2016, and it was then that he committed to creating a community-based event with JCSU. The character of Maseo definitely targets the connections JCSU has sought to address.

With the backing of JCSU and its Collegiate Health Improvement Project (C.H.I.P.), Lee could aspire to far higher production values than the workshop version of A Walk in My Shoes that premiered in November 2013.

“A Walk in My Shoes 2013 was a poorly funded, community theatre effort,” Lee admits. “The intent was to cast ‘the community’: People living with HIV, people in high risk groups for HIV and inspired LGBTQ peeps. A Walk in My Shoes 2017 is a professional theatre production with a working budget, comped cast and crew, seasoned singer/dancer/actors and a grassroots marketing strategy.”

Right. This time, the press was actually informed that Lee was involved.

This week’s three-performance run at the Attic Theatre marks a homecoming for Lee. Before it became the HQ for Little Rock Community Development Center, 401 N. McDowell Street housed the city’s Afro-American Cultural Center, which was reborn as The Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture.

Lee was a resident teaching artist at the old Afro-Am – after graduating from UNC Charlotte, interning for the urban division of Arista Records in Atlanta, and performing on Disney Cruises for two years. So he knows the Attic well. In fact, he workshopped Love of Harlem up yonder, and directed Cheryl West’s Before It Hits Home there seven years ago.

“It’s the perfect intimate venue for a show like A Walk in My Shoes,” Lee says, “where I desire the audience to feel like players in the story…bystanders watching it all go down.”

Lee won’t specify exactly where his musical takes place, other than to say it’s in a Southern metro area “like” Charlotte. Or Atlanta. Or Houston. He also slipped the question of whether Pastor Rutherford was based on a particular local cleric or political figure, choosing instead to make a stunning statistical revelation: “More than 50% of the clients I referred to psychosocial care were wounded, sometimes suicidal, due to religious oppression.”

There is, however, an unexpected local tie-in to the new production of A Walk in My Shoes. Pastor Clifford Matthews Jr., spiritual leader of the St. Luke’s Missionary Baptist Church, came out to his congregation and withstood an exodus of his flock, most of whom have since returned. This gay pastor will be playing the role of the homophobic Pastor Rutherford!

“It was important to him that affirming pastors and churches like his be highlighted sometimes,” Lee explains. “Respectfully, I told him my conviction was to give light to the most common truth, which is most traditional Black congregations are homophobic. His church and others like it are the anomalies.”

And it might be mentioned that Black churches are the wellspring of some mighty rousing music. Gospel is one of the prime elements of Lee’s score, co-composed with Tyrone Jefferson of A Sign O’ the Times Band. The music also roams into the realms of pop rock, R&B, and jazz.

For the pair of hip-hop song lyrics, Lee called upon local poetess L’Monique. Lee is nothing if not connected in this town, so he could also call upon the Reliable Brother dance group, who performed at Breakin’ Convention CLT in both 2015 and 2016, to make the hip-hop dancing world-class. Mesmerizing, Lee promises.

Back in 2014, when we last saw For the Love of Harlem, Lee was at best when his music was big and brash – as it was in the opening title song, presented with the added sizzle of splashy ensemble choreography. Expect more of the same for the opening title number up at Attic Theatre.

Later on, a funky R&B tune, “Trouble,” proved to be an audience favorite at the workshop production three years ago. Another big number brings out the dancers.

“The weekend anthem ‘Friday Night’ and the vogue dance ensemble are unforgettable,” says Lee. “People stop me in the grocery store singing that song.”