Playwright: Terry Abrahamson. At: National Pastime Theater at the Old Speakeasy, 4139 N. Broadway. Phone: 773-327-7077; $30. Runs through: Nov. 28
Even those who lived through the troubles of the 1960s find it hard nowadays to imagine an America when uttering the word “marijuana” meant that your house could be searched by the police, when singing a 40-year-old pro-union anthem could lead to your losing your job and criticizing the government could find you under surveillance—arrested, if you resisted—by federal agents. This widespread oppression, spanning all demographics, was inevitably applied more harshly to disenfranchised minorities, despite the latter’s long experience at keeping their heads down.
DuWane Lister—nicknamed “Doo” for his profession as a barber—has as low a profile as could be desired, despite the Garfield Park riots just outside his basement-shop window bearing a placard proclaiming it “negro-owned” to discourage looters. A composer of sugary love songs in his off-time, Lister welcomes a North Shore-hippie record-distributor seeking to use the store as a vending outlet, seeing in it a source of extra income toward starting a family with his schoolteacher wife. But after his draft-dodging brother is killed during a bungled FBI bust, the peaceful haircut-artist embraces radicalism to write music on darker themes.
Terry Abrahamson’s documentary-tinged drama, currently enjoying revival under the auspices of National Pastime Theater, has undergone several rewrites since premiering in 1999 to emerge almost bursting at the seams with cogent observations on its times: the more intense harassment of Black dissenters than that imposed on white protesters, for example. (“It sounds like Pete Seeger,” declares an upper-echelon spook of Lister’s new lyrics, “That makes it communist”.) Or there’s the link between the poetry-jazz fusions of the Beat era and the rise of spoken-word performance, culminating in—are you following this?—the expository verse bridging our play’s scenes and locating us historically, delivered by a young afrocentric rapper whose identity we discover only in the final moments.
Abrahamson’s text might require multiple viewings to absorb in all its dimensions—don’t forget the indigenous references: among them, Fahey Flynn, WVON’s late-nite deejays and Uptown as a sanctuary for fugitives. But director Victor Cole keeps the story firmly rooted in the microcosmic journey of one humble hero caught amid warring factions beyond his control, played by the engaging Warren Levon with the able assistance of a cast invoking personalities no bigger or broader than the volatile era they occupy.