Hi, theater readers! It’s your theater critic Helen Shaw this week, taking over your newsletter experience to talk about a remounting of the 2017 folk-blues song cycle “Animal Wisdom,” written by our doyenne of the secular-sacred, Heather Christian. I visited the Signature Theater in Manhattan to talk about the revival with Christian and the show’s new protagonist, the Broadway star Kenita R. Miller. I was also in the quiet theater — haunted, as all dormant stages are — while they sang together. It was the first time Christian had ever accompanied Miller, who now takes Christian’s place as “H” in the show. (Video of that beautiful experience is here.) Christian, a MacArthur-winning composer, is best known for “Oratorio for Living Things” and “Terce” — exquisite quasi-liturgical choral pieces that borrow from Roman Catholic Mass structures. In “Animal Wisdom,” though, she created a kind of service for one, sitting at the piano and banging through autobiographical songs (with rollicking band backup) about her own spiritual crisis. Christian grew up in Natchez, Miss., and has a preternatural perception of the veil between worlds. In “Animal Wisdom,” she calls on the ghosts — mainly of grandmothers in her matrilineal line — who stay, always, just outside her conscious vision. So how does a theater performer evoke someone else’s ghosts? Usefully, Miller has experience with performance as channeling. She was stunning (not to mention, Tony-nominated) as the Lady in Red in the 2022 Broadway revival of Ntozake Shange’s “for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf,” performing that dance-heavy choreopoem while, at one point, eight months pregnant. “It definitely felt like Ntozake’s spirit was there,” Miller said during my visit. “And then my baby was there, and I didn’t know who she was yet; I just knew she was a little girl. In the show, we used Ntozake’s voice — and she calls on ‘Mamie,’ which is my mom’s name,” Miller said with a shiver. “So I got to evoke my mom, myself and my child … and then the rest of us. So that was a gift, and, in the same sense, this feels like a gift, because I feel like I am getting closer to the women in my family.”
In a lull between performances of the production, running at Signature through June 14, Christian pointed out items from her childhood home that have been hidden amid the attic-jumble set. Onstage shrines also contain significant touchstones, including Christian’s photographs of the Natchez cemetery and upholstery swatches. One of the shrines is covered with pennies, talismanic objects that resonate strangely with what Miller has been learning about her own lineage. “There are definitely some hoodoo women in my family — medicine women who came with knowledge that wasn’t taught at school,” Miller told me. Performing “Animal Wisdom” has given Miller a sense of resilience too. “I feel like it is a great vehicle to work through some things that I want to learn from, some things I want to completely get rid of and then some things I just want to understand better how to carry,” Miller said of the show. “This has given me a kind of a beautiful mask to do that. It makes me feel not so alone in trying to exorcise these things.” If you talk to spirits, though, they might talk back. “The ghost of my grandmother locked one of our bandmates in the bathroom during our rehearsal process,” Christian said, matter-of-factly. “I was like, ‘I think that’s Geraldine.’ And then I showed up the next day, and our prop person had brought in another prop chair, and it was the exact chair that was part of her dining room set in Louisiana.” I guess Geraldine had notes. Please reach out to us at theaterfeedback@nytimes.com with suggestions for articles or to offer your thoughts about our coverage. And urge your friends to subscribe to this newsletter. Have a wonderful week, Like this email?Forward it to your friends, and let them know they can sign up here.
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