DATEBOOK PICK
In Bay Area theater, Ayodele Nzinga mixes a piercing intellect with a griot’s all-seeing eye, a crusader’s moral clarity and an entrepreneur’s hustle.
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“Going to St. Ives”: 8 p.m. Friday, July 17; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, July 18; 2 p.m. Sunday, July 19. Through July 26. Free-$158.03. BAM House, 1540 Broadway, Oakland. 510-332-1319. www.lowerbottomplayaz.com
She was Oakland’s first poet laureate, and the theater company she founded, Lower Bottom Playaz, bills itself as the first in the country to stage all 10 plays in August Wilson’s Century Cycle in the order in which they’re set. She also founded the Black Arts Movement Business District Community Development Corp. to preserve Black arts along the four blocks of Oakland’s 14th Street from Lake Merritt to Interstate 880.
As a theater artist, she’s been most active as a director and playwright. Now, fans have a rare opportunity to see her onstage.
In Lee Blessing’s 1997 play “Going to St. Ives,” Nzinga plays May N’Kame, the mother of a dictator of an unnamed African country. She’s gone to England to see Dr. Cora Cage (Teresa Foss) ostensibly for a severe eye condition. But both women have ulterior motives.
Frequent Nzinga collaborator Cat Brooks directs the Lower Bottom Playaz production, in which geopolitical power isn’t wielded by chest-beating men but by women in a parlor over tea. As the sipping proceeds, Nzinga gets to deliver delicious lines like, “Why do men build empires, if not to show their mothers?”
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This article originally published at Ayodele Nzinga was Oakland’s first poet laureate. Here’s where to see her onstage now.