"Love, Life and Redemption": Setor Attipoe’s Universal Dream
By Steven Maginnis
Living on a lighted stage
Approaches the unreal
For those who think and feel
In touch with some reality
Beyond the gilded cage.
Rush, “Limelight”
In theater, many plays present surrealistic worlds for their audiences, and “Love, Life & Redemption,” a new play by actress and playwright Setor Attipoe, is no different. However, Ms. Attipoe’s play is distinguished in one respect; its surrealist, dreamlike setting seeks to illuminate the reality of life itself. Through dramatizations of fifteen poems Ms. Attipoe had written over seven years, “Love, Life & Redemption (and everything in between)” illustrates universal themes of love, loss, enlightenment, adversity, and triumph.
Ms. Attipoe first got the idea for “Love, Life & Redemption” when she sought to present her poems publicly. Once she decided to dramatize them on the stage, she tied them together through a single character. The play’s protagonist, Carolyn Bowers (played by Melissa Scott), is a teacher, poet, actress and activist with a vibrant personality and a nurturing spirit, having taken sociopolitical stands and inspired many proteges. As a black woman, Ms. Attipoe conceived Carolyn Bowers as a black female character, she is presented her as an artist first and foremost, and one who happens to be a black woman. Carolyn represents Ms. Attipoe’s intent on bringing meaningful roles for women and minorities to the stage – as an actress herself, she’s sensitive to this concern – but also to create characters that aren’t so easily defined by gender, race, or ethnicity.
The play begins straightforwardly enough. Carolyn learns she is to be given a lifetime achievement award from a revered arts organization and is overwhelmed until she learns she has to write an acceptance speech in a matter of days. Carolyn enlists a theater company comprised of actors she’s mentored to present her poems, which represent her life’s experiences, as performance pieces. The actors end up getting poems assigned to them more or less by luck of the draw, which results in a couple of performers receiving poems they feel unsuited for interpreting. The most striking example is a pair of Chinese-American sisters being asked to interpret a rap song, which provokes a sibling rivalry to produce the better interpretation.
Cast in this unlikely role,
Ill-equipped to act
With insufficient tact,
One most put up barriers
To keep oneself intact.
Rush, “Limelight”
“Love, Life & Redemption” then quickly changes from a conventional portrait of an artist contemplating her past to a series of intensively moving vignettes of love, longing, rites of passage, and social commentary. The words of the poems are driven by characters who are haunting, vivid reflections of human experience, illustrating human frailty and strength through a multiracial cast that leaves out no one.
Love, particularly the meaning of it, is the dominant theme in many of the poems. In the opening piece, “Love Is,” a young man offers various explanations and definitions of love that swing back and forth from romantic, tender notions to brutal descriptions of torture, the actor’s body language (as directed by Ms. Attipoe) accordingly in tune with the words. The playful side of relationships is explored in “Locked,” a Samson and Delilah parable, played by Mavis Martin and John Rankin, in which a woman attempts to entice a reticent partner to let out his dreadlocked hair as a metaphor for revealing his personal side. Her lover sidesteps her out of personal doubt but lets on that the temptation is there. “The Girl I Was,” a far more brutal piece, depicts Laura Lamberti playing a prostitute abused by her pimp finding the courage to break the cycle of dependency and walk out of her confined space to find love elsewhere.
As the intensity of the performances builds, so does the subject matter. Later poems boldly address social injustice from an intensely personal viewpoint, their narrators forcefully refusing to be defined by stereotypes and vowing defiantly to bring about change. “Magazine” finds a young black man (Tunde Somade) ranting against the mainstream for simplifying and dumbing down reality, and compartmentalizing people into stereotypical roles. Urging a challenge against the manipulative media establishment, he casts the first stone by professing his fondness for the rock band Nirvana. Several more stones are yet to be cast.
Living in a fisheye lens,
Caught in the camera eye.
I have no heart to lie,
I can’t pretend a stranger is
long awaited friend.
Rush, “Limelight”
“Love Life & Redemption” climaxes with “Diallo/Bell,” a damning indictment of the New York police shootings of Amadou Diallo in 1999 and Sean Bell in 2006. Ms. Attipoe’s poem, opening onstage with the sound of gunfire, brings to life the sister of Amadou Diallo (played by Mavis Martin) and the widow of Sean Bell (played by Marlana Marie) angrily describing how their lives have been forever changed. They militantly declare their intention to help prevent future police violence so that others may be spared similar grief, even as they struggle to overcome their own fears of humanity in the face of unwanted media attention.
The scenes depicting the two Chinese-American sisters trying to interpret “Lamb To a Lion,” a feminist rap piece about overcoming docility to assume strength and courage, are perhaps the funniest segments of “Love, Life & Redemption” but possibly the most relevant. In the original February 2007 production of the play, “Lamb To a Lion” was performed by one Asian-American actress; the play depicted her taking on a seemingly impossible task – how to make hip-hop sound credible from a woman of East Asian decent. As played by New York actress/singer Faith Wu, the woman diligently tries to master the rap song and succeeds with an interpretation that allows her to find a strong, independent voice of her own. Ms. Attipoe has since rewritten the scene featuring “Lamb to a Lion” for two Asian-American actresses (Amy Chang and Jeanie Tse). In the rewrite, the two sisters separately try to find their voices and convey personal strength by taking on the challenge of performing the rap song. After failing in their separate attempts to do so, despite an intense rivalry between them, the sisters collaborate and find strength in unity. The two lambs have found their voices and have been transformed into proud lionesses, and their rapping is as direct and straightforward as any hip-hop off the streets. Even detractors of hip-hop, as well as skeptics of the idea of song lyrics as poetry, will be impressed.
All the world’s indeed a stage
And we are merely players,
Performers and portrayers,
Each another’s audience
Outside the gilded cage.
Rush, “Limelight”
Ms. Attipoe has also expanded her play to include elements of dance and mime, adding extra dimensions to it. In the original production of “Love, Life & Redemption,” she employed a ballet dancer in the guise of a whitefaced mime to perform to “Longing,” a poem about desire and unrequited affection. After the first two of the original production’s four performances, the play was quickly redone to have the ballet dancer appear as a motionless ballet statue in every scene, casting a relentless watch over the interpretations of the poems, making no judgements and offering no opinions. Coming to life in “Longing,” in which actress Laura Lamberti bares her soul and yearns for her absent lover, the living statue poignantly moves with grace and tenderness, echoing the warm, soft feelings of the poem. Quietly showing the woman she is not alone, the statue itself has been inspired to break away from its pedestal and express emotions of her own. (In both versions of the original production, the statue mime was portrayed by Therisa Barber, a British ballet dancer based in New York whose living statue act has made her one of the city’s most recognizable street performers.)
Ultimately, “Love, Life & Redemption” through its depictions of human experience, is not about Carolyn Bowers, nor is it about a troupe of young actors who define themselves through their art. It’s about the audience, and the desire of Ms. Attipoe to make the audience leave the theater with a new perspective on life. Toward the end of the play, Carolyn awakes from a nap. The dramatic interpretations of her poetry, it is revealed, have been a dream. Far from being a distraction, the dream has been an inspiration; having found an underlying theme that allows her to make sense of her life, Carolyn writes her speech.
Carolyn tells her audience that she has found in her life one simple message: Go out and live the life you’ve imagined. She urges her audience to create the world they choose to live in, make their dreams happen, and fulfill their yearnings. “Don’t make no excuses,” she exhorts, the double negative emphasizing the immediacy of her commanding advice, “Get up out of bed, and get up on your feet.” As she speaks, her proteges do just that; the theater company comes up behind her in a mirror image of audience members who dare to dream and especially act on their dreams.
Living in the limelight,
The universal dream
For those who wish to seem. . . .
Those who wish to be
Must put aside the alienation,
Get on with the fascination,
The real relation,
The underlying theme.
Rush, “Limelight”
“Love, Life & Redemption” is about a common humanity in all of us. Although the poems in the play were written separately, they still reflect Setor Attipoe’s thoughts and feelings about universal issues.
“My writing has always been about humanity,” Ms. Attipoe says, “and a lot of subjects I write about are timeless. I think they reflect everyone’s experiences in life.”
Her ultimate message is to love, to live, to redeem oneself, and bring meaning to everything in between.
The real relation,
The underlying theme. . . .
Rush, “Limelight”
