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Theater Review | 'Angela's Mixtape'

A Struggle to Grow Up in an Activist’s Shadow

From left, Linda Powell, Kim Brockington and Eisa Davis play relatives in Ms. Davis’s “Angela’s Mixtape,” at the Ohio Theater.Credit...Jim Baldassare
Angela's Mixtape

“Wake up,” Mom says. “It’s time to go to the demonstration.”

So dawns another politically engaged morning in the unorthodox Berkeley, Calif., household that was home to Eisa Davis, the actress (“Passing Strange”) and author of the engaging new free-form autobiographical show, “Angela’s Mixtape,” that opened on Thursday night at the Ohio Theater, a co-production of New Georges and the Hip-Hop Theater Festival.

Ms. Davis’s full name is Angela Eisa Davis. Leapfrog the middle and you have the handle of an American woman both celebrated and reviled during the tumultuous 1970s. That Angela Davis, the scholar and activist jailed for more than a year before being acquitted of involvement in a violent attempt to free a prisoner, is Angela Eisa Davis’s aunt, and the secondary subject of this appropriately turbulent and quite funny show about the forces that influence the forging of identity.

Styled as an affectionate tribute to her aunt as well as a memoir of her own unusual upbringing, “Angela’s Mixtape” is a rhythmic collage of scenes, songs and reminiscences. It hopscotches from the 1970s to the 1980s and beyond, moving back and forth in time.

The radiant Ms. Davis, who portrays a wide-eyed, wildly energetic younger version of herself in the show, is joined by four actresses, who play her aunt (Linda Powell), her mother (Kim Brockington), her grandmother (Denise Burse) and her cousin (Ayesha Ngaujah), as well as various subsidiary roles.

On the morning referred to above, the young Eisa pesters her mother with typical childish insistence. “Why is it called a demonstration?” she asks. “What are we demonstrating?”

“Our unity!” her mother patiently responds. “We are showing people there is a mass movement and that we want social and economic justice for oppressed peoples all over the globe.”

“Who are oppressed people?”

“We are all oppressed as long as there is injustice.”

With tutorials like this taking place before a breakfast of tofu scramble, little Eisa grows naturally into a peppy little radical, shouting “Off the pig!” at rallies and beginning her career as a performer by singing freedom songs and reciting selections from her aunt’s autobiography.

But while her political consciousness is being carefully tended, Eisa finds her own attempts to assert a distinctive identity getting lost in the shuffle of activism and hobnobbing with elite African-Americans that consumed much of her mother’s time. Eisa would prefer to stay at home and participate in an important piano recital, but her mother insists that she join the family on a trip to Grenada, which offers “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the revolution in action.”

Although the tone of the scenes set in Ms. Davis’s early youth are rich in humor and crazy paradox — she and her mother earnestly discuss the ontological questions raised by the movie “Back to the Future” in one particularly loopy passage — the aching sense of casual neglect is unmistakable.

For the most part, however, Ms. Davis does not dig too deeply into the darker material; as an autobiography, “Angela’s Mixtape” is fleet and mostly sweet, accenting the comic wonders of the world in which she grew up, and often breaking into a perky dance just when matters begin to get emotional.

That’s not a major drawback, since the history of the family that is woven into the show is naturally absorbing and at times harrowing. Selections Ms. Davis and Ms. Powell read from Angela Davis’s autobiography reveal the brutal racism Angela and her sister faced when they moved along with other black families to a largely white neighborhood in Birmingham, Ala. This was the late 1940s, and “bombings were such a constant response that soon our neighborhood became known as Dynamite Hill.”

Ms. Powell brings a composed dignity to her performance as Angela, and Ms. Brockington’s blend of maternal concern and intellectual imperiousness feels just right. Ms. Davis herself is convincingly naïve, staying inside the skin of her younger self with admirable ease, although there are times when you wish she had also included more mature reflections on her experience.

“How do I live up to my name?” is the pointed question that Ms. Davis asks at the top of the show. In a sense the production, directed by Liesl Tommy, never resolves the clash between the high drama of her family history and the young Eisa’s more mundane struggles with self-determination. The stories of her aunt’s experience can make Eisa’s agonizing over her friendships, music lessons and her crushes on boys seem inconsequential, and some of the writing for the mother-daughter resolution feels a little pat.

But the strange juxtaposition of the prosaic trials of adolescence and the urgent radicalism of the family politics is also what gives the show its own distinctive identity. That’s the burden Ms. Davis had to bear, trying to move through the choppy waters of self-discovery while being asked to carry a weighty sense of racial and cultural history in the trendy one-shouldered backpack she liked to carry.

ANGELA’S MIXTAPE

By Eisa Davis; directed by Liesl Tommy; sets by Clint Ramos; lighting by Sarah Sidman; sound by Jane Shaw; costumes by Jessica Jahn; production stage manager, Ryan Raduechel; associate producer, Anna Hayman; produced by Susan Bernfield and Sarah Cameron Sunde. Presented by New Georges, Ms. Bernfield, artistic director; Ms. Sunde, associate director; and the Hip-Hop Theater Festival, Clyde Valentin, executive director; Kamilah Forbes, artistic director. At the Ohio Theater, 66 Wooster Street, between Spring and Broome Streets; SoHo; (212) 868-4444. Through May 2. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

WITH: Kim Brockington (Mommy), Denise Burse (Grandma), Eisa Davis (Eisa), Ayesha Ngaujah (Cess) and Linda Powell (Angela).

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