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Theater review: Storytelling creates bond with audience

Star Tribune

Published: February 1, 2003

By Graydon Royce

I sat in the tiny Center for Independent Artists Theater Thursday night and watched Carlyle Brown for 100 minutes, telling stories about his 1981 trip to Africa.  I would have happily stayed another 100.

In “The Fula From America” Brown uses his journey to explore his feelings about identity, ending up on the hyphen in African-American and realizing that while Africa is his ancestral homeland, he is at the end of the day an American.  And glad of it.

Brown’s work is so rich that I hesitate to reduce it to that message-as revealing, provocative and thoughtful as it might be.  But the lesson’s strength derives from his capacity for direct, honest storytelling, an unerring eye for just the right detail, spare and poetic language and charismatic performance.

“In 1981, I came into $3,500 and decided to use half of it to take a trip to Africa,” he says matter-of-factly to start the show.  As he contemplates his ancestral quest, searching his consciousness for meaning, Johnny Weismuller’s Tarzan call rings through the theater’s speakers.  White America had dictated his images of Africa.

Brown seamlessly streams one story into one another with a crisp ear for dramatic build.  You feel his isolation as he lands in Senegal without the currency of language.  He revels in portraying the folks he met-who become his escorts, friends, saviors and persecutors.  He becomes animated with anger as he recalls waiting for days for a flatbed truck to take him to Sierra Leone, offended by the nonexistent customer service and disturbed by his resemblance to an Ugly American (cue Tarzan cry one last time).

Breathless tension grips a scene in which the van he’s traveling is stopped by soldiers who order him to the side of the road.  In another, a single muted light illuminates him as he recalls stepping inside the cells where his ancestors waited for shipment as slaves, his words evoking the fetid turmoil and agony.

The title comes from a fellow traveler’s remark that Brown looked like a Fulani, a nomadic people in western Africa.  When he replied that he was an American, Brown quickly became know as the “Fula from America,” which became a metaphor for his growing identification with the land he was traversing.

But the ragged uncertainty of political unrest that arbitrarily can drag a man down, the injustices and the grinding poverty also led to his epiphany about being an American.

Near the end of tale, Brown recalls with envy the way a theater troupe in Sierra Leone quickly established a bond with their audience.  He approaches that with this piece.

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