Stoop Stories

STOOP THERAPY Orlandersmith shares her stories.

Photo: Eric Y. Exit

Dael Orlandersmith transforms herself into a cavalcade of urban characters in her one-woman show, receiving its Chicago debut, but its central figure is Manhattan itself. Panning from 125th Street to the Bowery and studded with references to the likes of Langston Hughes, Kerouac, Lester Young and the New York Dolls, the 65-minute piece paints a city at once thrilling and dangerous, united across ethnic lines by artistic and erotic experience and isolating in its indifferent magnitude. In one poignant episode, Orlandersmith encounters a teenage pal 20 years later, living on the East Village streets and promising to get clean soon. Heroin haunts many of the stories, from the initial, sweet scenario of a Polish Holocaust survivor who shares a drink with Lady Day to the tale of Sugar, a gifted young poet lured to the needle by her boyfriend.

Orlandersmith, a commanding presence who began as a poet herself in the heyday of the Nuyorican Café, surrounds her portraits with dense lyric meditations on the stoop, music and literature. Stoop Stories loses some steam in its second half; sketches of an elderly black man en route to a Nina Simone concert and of a neighborhood girl trapped by a teenage pregnancy come off as generic. The piece’s larger structure remains a bit obscure as well: Orlandersmith offers just enough autobiography to make you want to learn more about her own journey before she disappears again into character. Still, Stoop Stories offers a convenient and bracing, if brief, trip to Gotham.

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