‘Insurrection’ Takes Provocative Look at Slavery

The spirits are restless. The ghosts of slaves, they have been conjured up by a 189-year-old man who has defied death in his long wait for someone who will listen. Finally that person has arrived--a great-great-grandson ready to hear his story ... ready to hear history.

Such is the fanciful nature of Robert O’Hara’s powerful, provocative “Insurrection: Holding History,” receiving its Los Angeles premiere after developmental presentations at Mark Taper Forum New Work Festivals in the mid-’90s and after earning acclaim in New York and San Francisco. The Celebration Theatre production is being presented at the McCadden Place Theatre in Hollywood while the Celebration’s hit production of “Pinafore” continues in its home.

Much like George C. Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum,” “Insurrection” stares deep into the darkness of slavery and prejudice--and dares to laugh.

As time fragments around the old man and his great-great-grandson, they find themselves on an 1830s slave plantation, where the weighing of cotton is turned into a game show. If a slave’s harvest is of an acceptable weight, a bell rings; if unacceptable, a buzzer sounds. Losers receive a whipping. In the present day, a white character offhandedly spouts epithets, only to find himself ambushed by hatchet-wielding revolutionaries from Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion.

This time-bending adventure begins when Great-Great-Grandpa (Wil Bowers) insists that his descendant, Ron (Jeramie Gladman), take him for a ride. Ron, a graduate student at Columbia University, protests that he needs to be heading back to school to work on his doctoral thesis about the Turner rebellion. But when he gives in, he finds that the trip takes him to the time of the rebellion and transforms Great-Great-Grandpa into his younger self.

In this ghostly world (conjured up in shades of nightmare green in Mercedes Younger’s set design), Ron not only meets Turner (Mark Anthony Hall, brimming with gospel fire) but finds a soul mate in Hammet (Lonnie Simpson), a Turner follower with the soul of a poet. In one of the most beautiful moments of Derek Charles Livingston’s staging, Ron discovers in Hammet’s tender touch--and an innocent exchange of breath--what it meant to be gay in the slave-era South.

He learns still more about the legacy of slavery, which, now as then, pits people against one another and gives rise to barbaric behavior all around. As Great-Great-Grandpa says to Ron: “You live in dangerous times, just like we do here.”

“Insurrection: Holding History,” McCadden Place Theatre, 1157 N. McCadden Place, Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends March 31. $15-$20. (323) 957-1884. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes.