TimeLine Theatre’s “Notes from the Field,” with Adhana Reid, Shariba Rivers and Mildred Marie Langford/Photo: Brett Beiner
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Nelson Algren advised writers to listen carefully to the way ordinary people speak—if you really listen, their words will “ring like poetry.”
In presenting the words of real people talking about America’s troubled education and criminal justice system in her 2015 play “Notes from the Field,” writer and actress Anna Deavere Smith found poetry. She also made a strong, nuanced argument for compassion and change.
TimeLine’s The new production of Smith’s play by TimeLine uses three remarkably versatile and talented actors—Mildred Marie Langford, Shariba Rivers and Adhana Reid—to portray nineteen different people in an intimate, compelling evening of theater. You’ll leave feeling both shaken and exhilarated, able to see America’s racial problems and school-to-prison pipeline with fresh eyes.
The characters range from household names, like NAACP Legal Defense President Sherrilyn Ifill and late Congressman John Lewis, to lesser-known heroes like activist Bree Newsome, who took the Confederate flag down from the pole on the South Carolina State House grounds.
The transformations seem magical—achieved only through a change of clothes (fine work by costume designer Christine Pascual) and dialect, along with great commitment by the actors to each personality.
TimeLine Theatre’s “Notes from the Field,” with Adhana Reid/Photo: Brett Beiner
Reid, for example, changes from the sophisticated Ifill in a jewel-colored suit jacket in one scene to a teenage activist in a hoodie in another, feet up on a school desk, relating humiliating encounters with the Baltimore police. Rivers is a Yurok fisherman in orange waders, talking about his prison years, and in another scene becomes the Reverend Jamal Harrison Bryant, eulogizing Freddie Gray, who died in police custody. Rivers’ delivery of Bryant’s sermon about how racism puts Black people in a box, as in a coffin, is so powerful that audience members began shouting “Amen.” TimeLine company member Langford shows charisma and a marvelously authentic accent as Leticia De Santiago, a Mexican American community leader, shifting in another scene to a sorrowful prison inmate, Denise Dodson, thankful for her education behind bars.
No matter the costume, the actors are barefoot, showing the characters’ vulnerability and common humanity.
Directed by Mikael Burke in his TimeLine debut, the show moves swiftly. Though the running time is two-and-a-half hours, each monologue seems too short. The set and lighting designs by Eleanor Kahn and Eric Watkins are both simple and brilliant—dirt for a floor and a few items of metal furniture. Over the performance space is a tilted ring of light that changes color. Behind the performers are sections of broken fencing on which video and photos are projected, including the Confederate flag being taken down, and a Black schoolgirl being forcefully arrested by a white male officer.
The show is hopeful, not hectoring—showing how people can confront their own brokenness to heal the world. There is humor as well as pain. It ends with Lewis recalling how a police officer who had beaten him later asked for forgiveness. Lewis sees the encounter as a source of grace. The same can be said of this show—it’s an evening of grace and power, highlighting issues that haven’t changed much in the last nine years.
“Notes from the Field” is on stage at TimeLine Theatre, 615 West Wellington, through March 24. Tickets available at timelinetheatre.com.
