DANCING WITHOUT YOU: Still Finding Itself

In the program notes to her new play, Dancing Without You, Robin Rouse writes, “This is a story that has been trying to be told but which needed to be shown its identity. Once it became clear the story is a play, all of the scenes and characters stood up and wrote themselves.” She continues: “It is my deepest wish that strong lessons will be learned from this play.… [T]here is an enormous responsibility that we all have toward each other and ourselves to be kind, to act with forethought and foresight and fellow feeling.”

In many ways, the central problem that keeps Rouse from achieving these worthy ambitions is that her story seems to still be finding itself as a play. In its current form, it is more accurately described as a confessional monologue, the contents of which are only briefly, episodically dramatized. We are more likely to be told, for example, that two characters fell in love over a soulful conversation, or that one character has taken a strong dislike to another, than to hear that conversation or experience that dislike for ourselves.

Dancing Without You, which is being produced by the Catonsville Theatre Company as part of the Baltimore Playwrights Festival, tells the life story of an African-American Everywoman whom we follow from childhood to maturity, but whom we primarily know as an eloquent narrator called Hear Me. As she leafs through a memory album, Hear Me introduces us to seven aspects of her personality—there are Little Girl and Pretty from childhood and Love Me from adolescence, who morphs in college into Loosely, followed by Hostile, Save Me, and finally Lyric, a singer for whom professional success comes more easily than personal contentment.

Rouse populates her Everywoman’s world with familiar figures such as Daddy, Friend-Sister, White Guy, and Music Man, all of them types more than fully dimensional people. Each is trapped within the connotations of his or her name: Daddy is an idealized father until one day he leaves home, never to return; First Love is sensitive and seems to exist only to comfort the young heroine, until his own stalled life bottoms out in drug addiction; Mother glowers in the background, rarely—if ever—speaking to her daughter.

The limitations of these characters—which are most obvious in the supporting roles but which confine Hear Me and her various personas just as tightly—make it difficult to take seriously Rouse’s message of personal responsibility. Which of her characters are really given the chance to break free of the expectations imposed on them? Even the ending, inspiring though it tries to be, ultimately follows this pattern: Hear Me submitting to play one more role assigned to her by the playwright.

Though the script left me unmoved, I was generally impressed by the intensity and conviction of the actors. As Hear Me, Kelly Armstrong  radiates empathy as she watches the triumphs and tragedies of her character’s past play out before her; her face lights up with the memory of happier times, only to break with her heart as each sweet relationship turns sour.

Most of the happier memories come early, and Kecia Campbell in particular earns plenty of affectionate laughter as the naïve yet goodhearted Pretty. Still, casting fully grown actresses instead of children in the younger roles creates problems that director Rikki Howie and her cast prove unable to solve. Both Campbell and Janeara Hampton, who plays Little Girl, speak their lines in a cartoonish falsetto better suited to farce than to the increasingly somber world of Rouse’s play.

Howie also double- and triple-casts most of the actors, which leads to some confusion early in the play when actresses who had been playing supporting roles enter as the heroine and actresses who had been playing the heroine enter in supporting roles. More could have been done to distinguish each new character, both physically and vocally by the performers and visually by costumer JF Bibeau.

Fleshing out the heroine’s biography are solid performances by Keyinta Boyd as the teenaged Love Me, who apprehensively views college as a place to find herself; Ameerah Al-Mateen as Loosely, whose illusions are shattered by an endless procession of empty relationships and one-night stands; Vanessa Thompson as the appropriately-named Hostile; Curtish Chante as Lyric; and Ashley Parker as Save Me, who gradually bleeds into Armstrong’s narrator.

The men in the cast have less to work with, but William Walker succeeds in making Daddy both charismatic and cowardly, and Michael Robinson performs a similar trick with First Love. Grant Harvey, Willie Jones, Jr., Larry Saunders, and Jason Cabrera cycle effectively through a number of minor roles.

In the end, though, Dancing Without You rises and falls on the strengths and weaknesses of Rouse’s script. There are flashes of inspiration, such as when Rouse dims the spotlight on Hear Me, whose narration must comprise at least half of the play, and explores alternative means of telling her story—a wordless sequence in which Save Me, haunted by the ghosts of her previous selves, attempts suicide is particularly compelling. These flashes demonstrate that Rouse does indeed have a story to tell; for most of Dancing Without You, however, that story is still struggling to find its proper form.

Dancing Without You is presented by Catonsville Theatre Company as part of the 2009 Baltimore Playwrights Festival. It is playing at the Barn Theatre, located in Building B on the campus of the Community College of Baltimore County, Catonsville, at 800 S. Rolling Road, on Fridays and Saturdays at 8 PM and Sundays at 3 PM, through August 16^th. Tickets are $15-$18. For more information, call 443-840-4400 or email catheatrecompany@aol.com.

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