A Contemporary Theatre's Mojo

The Mojo and the Sayso which opened at ACT last night is four actors and a car, but the car is the thing, the main entity. The car is the set, the stage, and the focal character. It may not have any lines, but it stands in for everything that moves playwright Aisha Rahman's story forward. It's the absent child, gunned down by aggro off-duty cops, it's the broken family, being rebuilt from the ground up with parts scavenged from here or there, it's the hard facts of terrestrial life in the face of the easy fixes of shyster spirituality. Jennifer Zeyl designed the set. She's a genius, we hear.

The church takes a lot of punches in this play, and almost a knife and almost a bullet (and since this is a play in the round you, as an audience member, will likely have a gun pointed at you during the show). It's a bullet meant for...who knows in Seattle...Ken Hutcherson, maybe--He's the high profile guy that comes to mind. The Church, see, is sweeping in to collect the check that this family received to compensate them for the wrongful death of their son. A dollar amount is never mentioned, but it's enough to move the family and start over in a new life. Or enough to further enrich a local religious type who the mother is enthralled with, but he eventually gets exposed as a pretender and a hypocrite. This is a 20-year old play, but the final act is so contemporary it seems like it was written yesterday afternoon, what with Family Values Republicans currently tumbling out of the closet like it was a clown car.

It's a small play that contains a bunch of big themes like The Black Father, The Black Son, The Black Male, The Black Nuclear Family, grief, loss and recovery, and, of course, the Role of the Church in the Black Family. That's a lot to pack in to a tidy little hour and half package, but it's done pretty handily. After reading about how some of the monologues were jazz-inspired and that the play is "a forerunner of the emerging hip-hop theatre scene" we expected a little more from the language here, and there were some bright spots, but for the most part it was pretty flat, at least relative to some other recent big black Seattle theater events like Native Son and Radio Golf. It does have some things to add to the conversation started by those works, though, and it's a gorgeous production.