OnStage: Wilson's 'Gem' plays the big house

To prepare for the role of Aunt Ester, the spiritual center of August Wilson's "Gem of the Ocean," Marvette Knight went the extra 5,000 miles.

Two months ago, Knight visited the slave dungeons and markets of Ghana in West Africa, to get a sense of her unknown ancestry. There, she encountered the ghosts of history.

"To go into that castle and see the quarters where the men and women and kids were kept, and where the recalcitrant captives, who were unbroken, were left to die, that was a profound experience," she said. "Then, our guide took us to the top balcony where the slavers would stand and point and pick among the women.

"Just then, as we were up there, a group of schoolchildren ran into the yard, and we were standing in that spot while their beauty and innocence crashed through history."

In "Gem," which opens tonight in a Penumbra Theatre production at the Guthrie Theater, Aunt Ester is a spiritual guide who conducts citizens to the City of Bones. Her trips, like Knight's, lead them to a connection they hardly understand but is greater than themselves.

"Is it Marcus Garvey that said a people without history is like a tree without roots?" asked director Lou Bellamy. "This is August's answer to that. We have spiritual roots and can connect across all the hurt and history to something that heals us."

Wilson's Genesis

"Gem" is Wilson's Genesis. While the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright wrote the drama near the end of a life cut short at 60 in October 2005, it touches on themes and characters that crop up throughout his epic 10-play cycle about 20th-century African-American life.

Set in Pittsburgh in 1904, it centers on Citizen Barlow, a man who is seeking solace in the home of Aunt Ester.

"Gem" looks forward and backward, in Wilson's cycle and in history. Its characters are fresh out of slavery, some with hard-won hope even as they bear the scars of their experience.

"Gem" premiered at Chicago's Goodman Theatre in 2003 with Twin Cities actor Greta Oglesby as Aunt Ester. (Wilson cast her after seeing her perform at Penumbra.)

It was well-received the following year in New York, with Phylicia Rashad playing the seer. (Ben Brantley of the New York Times called the production a "swelling battle hymn of transporting beauty").

Bellamy has seen various productions of "Gem."

"I have been dying to do this play since I first saw it," he said last week before rehearsal. "I just wasn't satisfied with what I was seeing on the stage. I knew that there was much more to it. A lot of the way it's been done has been based in realism."

But it is a piece informed by Yoruba cosmology, he said, where Ogun and Oshun, the gods of iron and water, are at work. In exploring "Gem," Bellamy said he has found unexpected humor in it, which startled him.

"The play is funnier than I imagined it to be," he said. "There are things that are so hilarious in this production, I wondered if I was doing something wrong."

Grounding spirituality

In his production, a regional premiere, Bellamy said he is trying to bring "the spirituality of the play to ground so that it has a physical as well as metaphysical reason for its existence."

"Before they go to the City of Bones, Ester goes out and picks some herbs," he said. "Her kitchen is almost a chemical lab. She has the same knowledge as those brothers in Haiti who grind up puffer fish and give them to people to make them into zombies."

The director, a longtime Wilson friend and one of the playwright's finest interpreters, is pleased to be presenting "Gem" in the big house -- the Guthrie -- where Wilson's huge visage graces an outside wall panel.

"If there's any play to share on that large a level, this is the one," Bellamy said. "It demands it. I can't think of a better play to open up the top of the roof and let the voices go out."

What about the intimacy that people are accustomed to in Penumbra's St. Paul theater, where the actors seem to be sitting across the table from you?

"This work won't stay small," Bellamy said. "It's too big and too important, with a life force that makes you want to reach more and more people.

Bellamy is also glad to be working with the Guthrie because of what it means symbolically and for the two institutions. "We have to take some steps in each other's direction," he said. "August Wilson is our best foot, and I'm pleased to be putting him forward."

Guthrie director Joe Dowling said that he is pleased to have Penumbra produce work at the Guthrie.

"When we built the theaters, I made it clear that we would share the spaces with other companies whom we respect and admire," he said. "Lou Bellamy is the definitive director of August Wilson, and his wonderful company will bring this play to life in a unique and profound way."

Dowling added that next year, Penumbra will present Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun." "I hope this partnership will continue for the benefit of both companies and our audiences," he said.

Playing a myth

For Knight, elements of Aunt Ester's story parallel her own life. For example, Africa was a much-talked-about mythic place in her family just as Aunt Ester is much talked about in Wilson's other plays, Knight said.

"She is legend, if not myth," Knight said. "But in terms of playing her, she's a real person grounded in earth. She lives, breathes, cries, loves, laughs and hurts. She has been empowered to help people connect to their spiritual truths. She brings them face to face with who they are."

But how do you get around the fact that Aunt Ester is supposed to have been born in 1619, the first year that Africans arrived in America, and is still alive?

"Simple," said Knight. "She inherited it from someone else and is passing it on to someone else." Using dramaturgical clues, she said, they figure she's a senior citizen, probably in her 80s.

Knight also grounds her character in her own Christian faith, likening Aunt Ester to a church mother.

"All of us have so many gifts that speak to our passion and our lives," she said. "Aunt Ester's gifts are empathy and prophecy. She is an ordinary woman who has chosen to build those gifts and to live them. She has done whatever sacrifice is necessary to answer her calling."

Knight paused. "I was looking at pictures of Mahatma Gandhi recently, how emaciated he was because he was fasting and praying. That's the work you have to do for a larger purpose," she continued. "That's the sacrifice you have to make to connect to something so much bigger than yourself. That's what she does. That's what we all need to do if we are to get someplace where we are whole."

Rohan Preston • 612-673-4390