Paris was bursting with American writers, musicians and artists in the 1920s and ’30s, but one of them never really found her way home. Cabaret performer Josephine Baker was the toast of Paris, but, as an African American woman, was stung by rejection whenever she returned to the U.S.
“Once Upon a Time… Josephine Baker” is a new play by Austene Van that premiered Wednesday at Yellow Tree Theatre in Osseo, where Van is artistic director. Presented as a kind of historical fantasia — part chronicle of a life, part meditation on the questions that life inspires — it’s an increasingly involving drama with music that is Van’s first foray as a playwright.
While some exchanges in her script can seem more like historical exposition than conversation, Van is a veteran actor, director and choreographer who seems to know that her play needs a magnetic center point. And it is her. She delivers a simply astounding performance as a woman roiling with conflict and contradictions, a commanding yet vulnerable entertainer who sought to make a greater impact and found mixed results.
Austene Van stars as Josephine Baker, an African-American woman who became the toast of Paris as a cabaret performer, dictating the story of her complex and contradictory life to a young writer (Tolu Ekisola) in Yellow Tree Theatre’s “Once Upon a Time… Josephine Baker,” running through June 30. (Courtesy of Alex Clark)
Thanks to the framing device of a young African American woman sent to Paris by a publisher to aid Baker in completing her autobiography, the audience in the intimate Yellow Tree space gets up close and personal with a woman who burst out of a New York chorus line with a wildly athletic dancing style of expressive abandon, was recruited to Paris in 1925 and became a phenomenon, continuing to perform for 50 years.
She was also a spy for the French resistance and the only woman to speak at the 1963 “March on Washington” where Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. But Baker was also something of an enigma, and “Once Upon a Time” demonstrates why, as she frequently scrambles the details of her life, frustrating the young scribe sent to get the facts but encountering a subject more interested in fashioning something like a fictionalized fairy tale.
In Van’s hands, Baker becomes a captivating combination of compelling charisma and helpless vulnerability, sometimes disarmingly capturing that contradiction in her eyes. While she can at first seem a hot-headed, dictatorial prima donna, Van’s Baker is an enthusiastically committed performer, as evidenced by her full-body Charleston in a banana skirt and her sad crooning of “I’m Confessin’ (That I Love You).”
Throughout, we experience a woman on a constant quest for adoration and acceptance, driven by dark memories of the lynchings and abuse of her St. Louis childhood and haunted by the periodic U.S. tours on which she was loved by crowds, but stung by critics and rejected by hotels and restaurants for the color of her skin.
Van is complemented well by Tolu Ekisola as the incredulous journalist who throws up unwanted reality checks, JoeNathan Thomas as Baker’s exasperated bandleader and Jim Lichtscheidl as a series of suitors. Director Maija Garcia has crafted a staging with arresting variations in pace and emotional tenor, aided greatly by Sarah Brandner’s set and Samantha Fromm Haddow’s array of eye-catching costumes.
But this is, above all, Van’s show, and, as both author and star, she creates an insightful story and a tour de force performance.
Rob Hubbard can be reached at wordhub@yahoo.com.
‘Once Upon a Time … Josephine Baker’
When: Through June 30
Where: Yellow Tree Theatre, 320 Fifth Ave. S.E., Osseo
Tickets: $45-$15, available at 763-493-8733 or yellowtreetheatre.com
Capsule: Austene Van paints a powerful portrait of a 20th-century superstar.
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