Review: GHOST/WRITER at REPStage

Close the lights, put on the earbuds, and immerse yourself in the pain and poetry that tie the past and present together.

Art is sometimes the best lens to process the complex connections of history. In Dane Figueroa Edidi's world premiere radio play, GHOST/WRITER, the playwright's words weave themselves through time and place where generations are caught in the loom of historical and personal conflict.

Beautifully rendered performances by the author and actor, Edidi with Steve Polites are accompanied by the evocative sound design of Tosin Olufolabi. Director Danielle A. Drakes allows the language and voices to create what cannot be seen.

The actors shift effortlessly between multiple characters whose individual stories take the broad brush of history down to illuminating sketches of the inhumanity of slavery and racism. From Tulsa in 1920 to Baltimore in 2019, we find we cannot escape the past and it will find us if we hide from it. Passion and vengeance stalk these descendants of history. We are all haunted if we refuse to hear their stories and respect the lives they lived.

The language is lush even when the details are brutal. The words will wind around you in the dreamlike way of a purely audio experience. Edidi, knows the facets of these characters and stories well as an artist of multiple talents and as one of the exciting voices of an artistic renaissance that takes the entire history and diversity of the old New World and makes it whole and real and reborn.

GHOST/WRITER is available online until May 23, 2021. To purchase tickets, visit repstage.org.

For further information email boxoffice@howardcc.edu or call 443-518-1500.

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