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01/31/2018 11:01 PM“It’s all in the details,” or so the saying goes, and the details are the reason why the new autobiographical, one-woman play, Feeding The Dragon, is delighting audiences at Hartford Stage.
The play—written and performed by Sharon Washington and directed by Maria Mileaf—is just one act and 90 minutes. Washington, a seasoned stage and screen actor, and debuting playwright, in those 90 minutes beautifully details through more than a dozen vignettes and voices, her childhood growing up in an apartment in the New York Public Library where her father stoked the enormous furnace that had to be fed round the clock and hence was given on-site accommodations for his family.
This bit of history is fascinating unto itself—a bygone era (until heating systems were updated) when custodians and their families lived inside hundreds of enormous city libraries built with money donated by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Only 13 remain today.
But Washington takes us beyond her own magical experience of growing up in a library the early 1970s in a spacious three-bedroom apartment, with a baby grand piano where she took lessons, where she had free rein to all its books.
Washington has created a host of three-dimensional characters—parents, grandmother, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors, even the family dog—all with their own quirky, funny, compelling personalities, accents, and back stories. Those stories reveal both their hopeful spirits and darkest demons.
Washington’s relationship with her father is the most complex and powerfully described. He quotes the corny “Quitin’ Time” line out of Gone with the Wind every evening, and she observes how he makes a sooty, dark little room into an enchanted cave where his big, strong shadow danced on the wall, larger than life. She is made complicit in his drinking ruses and discovers her hero has feet of clay; he’s an alcoholic.
Washington becomes her own mother with a heavy New York accent in contrast to her husband’s southern drawl, making sure her children play by the rules but still get ahead, survive, and thrive in a white world where she often feels invisible.
Washington also takes us outside the walls of the library, transforming it into the famous Studio 54 discothèque she’d frequent as a teenager or recalling being sent to live with her aunt and uncle across town when her father was “off the wagon.” Her uncle, another marvelous, eccentric character, surprises her with his secret room filled with his beautiful artwork telling her, “I paint the world the way I want to see it.” And then on to a road trip with her father through dangerously racist southern towns, she meets and visits with his family in Charleston.
Tony Ferrieri’s straightforward set composed of tightly stacked bookshelves flanked by wooden card catalogs and large stained-glass panels leaves plenty of open space for Washington’s lively, choreographed moves. The panels, creatively back-lit by Ann Wrightson, are in a constant flux of gorgeous color, flickering and glowing, enhancing such scenes as the mother and daughter desperately fanning the flames in the furnace that’s about to go out. Sound design by Lindsay Jones fills out the production with the noises of the city and the music of the times.
While in narrator mode, Washington interjects passages from her favorite books throughout the play.
“Hold fast to dreams for when dreams go, life is a barren field frozen with snow,” she quotes from the poem “Dreams” by Langston Hughes.
In this relentlessly cold New England winter, Feeding the Dragon is a lovely, comforting reminder of the richness of dreams and the magic of memories and a fertile imagination.
Amy J. Barry has been writing about Connecticut professional theater for more than 25 years. She is a member of the Connecticut Critics Circle. (ctcritics.org).
Performances of Feeding the Dragon continue at Hartford Stage, 50 Church Street, downtown Hartford through Sunday, Feb. 4. For tickets and times, visit www.hartfordstage.org or call the box office at 860-527-5151.