"Hands that Could" Sets the Phoenix Ablaze

Watts' Phoenix Hall is set ablaze in the world premiere of "Marty and the Hands that Could"

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WACO Theater Center and Watts Village Theater Company present the world premier of Marty and the Hands that Could by Josh Wilder, directed by Larry Powell.

There’s an oasis of color hidden in the very back of the Watts Community Labor Action Committee's parking lot. Hovering above the ramps of a bustling skatepark is a 20 foot tall mural stretched across the expansive depth of Phoenix Hall. When the neighborhood skateboarders take flight over the concrete quarter pipes, their silhouettes are absorbed into a lush backdrop of blood orange and turquoise titled “The Resurrection of Watts.” A timeless technicolor tableau where freedom fighter ancestors hover to watch today’s renegades rage against gravity.

Resplendent brown folk, part Aaron Douglas, part Earnie Barnes, stretch impossibly languid limbs toward the heavens, toiling under streetlights to create a space in the sky where plump brown babies can be beheld and blessed.

A cascade of cinnamon-complected women train their gaze on the pulleys they grasp in their thick Diego Rivera fists - pulled taut like a grid of protection high above terracotta rooftops, binding each of them to their intertwined fates.

This fiery tableau is the first wing of the Phoenix, illustrating the laborious sacrifice our communities undertake in order to elevate our children to their rightful places in the sun. Its next wing unfolds as you turn the corner where you’re joined by rows of three-dimensional tribal hieroglyphs whose obtuse forms dance gleefully in single file promenade with you toward the hall’s entrance.

The world premiere of “Marty and the Hands that Could” promises to transport audiences from South Los Angeles to South Philadelphia, but its staging at the Phoenix invites you first to journey into the annals of black resilience and excellence, from Middle Passage to Maxine Waters.

A doorless, deep tangerine archway exclaims beneath the industrial rolling shutter threshold, and within feet of entering, we are offered an excursion into the belly of a slave ship replica containing shadowy lifesized figurines shackled to soiled wood shelves. In that solemn, asphyxiating darkness, we face more than the waxen facsimile of our ancestors’s exploitation. We face the challenge of reimagining our modes of cultural exhibition and theatrical experiences that engage the horrors of our pasts without creating opportunities to process the trauma therein.

Beyond the ship's planks lies an expansive hall whose rolling walls bear Elliot Pinkney murals celebrating prominent figures across centuries of the African diaspora. There are no concessions for purchase; only culture to consume.

Processing through the narrow corridor toward the theater, we find ourselves in the long, craning neck of the Phoenix, encountering the first sounds of its voice as we voyage inward.

The pulsating, tribal synth beat loop of Kendrick Lamar’s “Mirrors'' ensnares us the moment we enter, introducing us to a protagonist struggling to escape toxicity. Mechanized voices chant “I choose me, I’m sorry/I choose me, I’m sorry.” in dissonant harmony that echoes through the hallway like an alarm. Lamar’s exhaustion “mourning through the family feuds” foreshadows the chaos 24-year-old Marty encounters when he is released from jail and returns to the porch of the family home where his fiercest demons first discovered his hands.

When we enter the Phoenix’s 75-seat black box theater, it feels less like we’ve taken a cross-country trek to Philly and more like we’ve opened the back wall of the theater to peer into the front porches behind South Central Avenue. The full scale street light dangling above the base of the stage feels simultaneously familiar and foreboding.

Floating off-centered and askance, it alerts us that we’re crossing over into a world where the bolts that secure our material realities have already come undone. The illuminating forces that used to help us navigate darkness and beckon us toward the safety of home now find themselves unmoored and precarious. The streetlight’s arch forms a figurative threshold, marking our entry into a space where even the strongest and most recognizable structures of our landscape are upended.

Other familiar artifacts from the concrete jungle fall in clusters on the periphery; construction horses emblematic of structural decay and improvements left incomplete, a mailbox expressing the enduring viability of traditional, predigital means of maintaining connections, house plants signaling a resident’s ability to nurture life amidst crippling decay.

The most visually arresting element, however, are the graffiti hands that stretch outward from the base of 5805 toward the floor beneath the theater’s front row. The bulging, 15-foot tall hands are true street art, sketched in a series of errant jabs. An in-progress draft that thought so much of itself (or so little of the environment) that it wrote itself in bold black paint then doubled down in daring neon accents. Their immense scale reminds us of the hands of God, invoking the powers of creation and healing. Yet, these hands do not hover in the distant heavens. They take to the ground, to the streets, to the asphalt, to the earth – unclenching their fingers and unfurling their fist to allow outside eyes a rare glimpse into the vulnerabilities within.

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About

WACO Theater Center is a performing and visual arts organization dedicated to the empowerment of Los Angeles artists, young people and stories of the African diaspora.

WATTS VILLAGE THEATER COMPANY nurtures and produces works of theater and educational programming that inspire action and dialogue about contemporary social issues to honor the rich history, cultural diversity and under-served populations of South Los Angeles.