Rep’s ‘New Age’ Is Not So New

New Age, at the Milwaukee Rep’s Stiemke Theatre, may not rise to the heights of gender and culture revelation suggested by its production overlays or its title. But it is bracing and often satisfying in monologues on age and women, featuring four impressive imported actors through May 1 and a playwright whose gifts with dialogue and ideas the Rep has wisely found worthy of frequent looks, Dael Orlandersmith.

Orlandersmith and director Jade King Carroll have actually combined separate monologues into intersecting commonality for women of different ages, cultures and experience, linked by a perception of how to survive in a man’s world of putdowns and rejections, particularly over a woman’s age.

The intersections are too often created by the production methods, which knit the playwright’s mystical mind reach into cultural connections across generations and even centuries – including Emily Bronte, Marilyn Monroe, Lou Reed, Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, the Met, the dancing motifs of Donna Summer and The Supremes, the great visual art of Europe, the black writers of racial freedom.

The cultural allusions sail by in the monologues. An evolving singer in her own right, actress Blair Medina Baldwin as Liberty, the 18-year-old runaway from a brutal home who longs to be a guitar guru, suddenly pulls out and sings “Freight Train” (by the belatedly discovered, left-handed folk guitarist Elizabeth Cotton) to confirm the almost cosmic cultural connections that keep the hourlong piece so interesting.

All are touched on in the music and sound overlays and a provocative scenic design by You-Shin Chen suggesting different locations for three of the women. Only the youngest, Liberty, moves among these stations, splashing through a shallow pool of water as she riffs along.

There are three occupying their own corners, with occasional collisions of their monologues. Candy at 45 (actress Courtney Rackley) twitches her lips and hips in a bar as a voluptuous Southern flirt free at last of the men who have dotted her life. Cass (Lisa Harrow, who radiates classic charm and education) is the 70-year-old grand dame of the arts who scorns how she once relied on a man to take her dancing – she now relishes dancing on her own.

Dying feistily at 80, Lisette (played by Delissa Reynolds as the embodiment of every irreverent grandmother and black female poet you can imagine) is confined to her book-laden study in an old people’s home, yet is almost the play’s centerpiece in her timeless sense of possibilities even as she faces death.

Harrow’s grand, almost British manner and ironic delivery are notable. Reynolds’ defiant old lady makes us feel like we are watching the conclusion of a grand parade of black stage heroines. Rackley has sassy fun, but with heart as the flirtatious Candy, and Baldwin has to warmly roam the stage and pretend to guitar greatness, providing the proper fingering to the wailing inventions of music director Bob Monagle and sound designer Lindsay Jones.

The term “new age” itself suggests alternative ways to inspect culture and values, but it is not newness but re-affirmation that seems the reality of this piece. The playwright is confirming insights rather than opening new doors.

Each personality is interesting but familiar in the efficient details of their stories, so it is the stage elements that mesh the production. We are applauding what in this age we should already know — that women are far more than teens to be abused or bedmates to be abandoned – but are capable of greatness even in old age.

New Age Gallery

Dominique Paul Noth served for decades as film and drama critic, later senior editor for features at the Milwaukee Journal. You’ll find his blog here and here.