The action is nonstop, exhilarating, with Nicholson hopping on a freight train's boxcar or riding a New York City subway, on the way to next phase.
Now playing at the Fountain Theatre, “Freight: The Five Incarnations of Abel Green” reveals five stages in a Black man’s life shown over the course of a century and linked by train rides taking him to each new incarnation.
Played by J. Alphonse Nicholson, Green starts by showing us his life performing in a minstrel show in a small Southern town in 1910, remarking “why not hire a real coon” whose face will stay black long after performance has ended, unlike, say, an Al Jolson who had to scrub off his black makeup time and again to be presentable.
J. Alphonse Nicholson (Photo by Jonathan Benavente)From there he fluidly time travels into a 1930’s faith healer, an FBI informant on the Black Panthers in 1969, an actor shunning an AIDS-infected friend in 1988, and finally to a former subprime loan officer who has chosen to be homeless to atone for his sins.
That’s a sketch of the play, written by Howard L. Craft and directed by Joseph Megel–and it’s remarkable stuff. But what is truly breathtaking, almost magical, is the way Nicholson portrays each very different incarnation. And that’s because he doesn’t simply “portray” characters–throwing on a bit of costume, adopting an appropriate accent, doing certain idiosyncratic mannerisms–no, he inhabits each incarnation, seeming very much like the Black Panther snitch or the drum-beating homeless man, so like someone you might see on the streets of New York.
An advantage of a one-man play is that the action is nonstop, exhilarating, with Nicholson hopping on a freight train's boxcar or riding a New York City subway, on the way to next phase, with what little downtime there is between the decades filled by Sidney Edwards, portraying “The Universal Flow,” dancing about the stage to move props into place and help Nicolson with his costume changes.
J. Alphonse Nicholson (Photo by Jonathan Benavente)Craft has argued that “Freight” demonstrates that a person's spirit returns to the world because it still has something to learn. “If the soul does not learn it, then it comes back to the world time and again until it’s successful.”
And successful is certainly the word for this marvelous bit of theatre magic.
Check out Ed Rampell’s review as well: “A Quintet of Characters Brilliantly Ilume a Century of Racism, Survival, and Struggles.”
Freight: The Five Incarnations of Abel Green is playing on Fridays, Saturdays and Mondays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. through December 16 (dark Monday, Nov. 13 and Friday, Nov. 24) at The Fountain Theatre located at 5060 Fountain Avenue in Los Angeles. For reservations and information, call 323.663.1525 or go to www.FountainTheatre.com.
