Future shock

35 Miles to Detroit is
a gripping cautionary tale

by Bill Rodriguez

Written and directed by Ricardo Pitts-Wiley. At Perishable Theatre through October 5.

Like the Ancient Mariner grabbing the lapels of the wedding guest in Coleridge's poem, Ricardo Pitts-Wiley's 35 Miles from Detroit, at Perishable Theatre, hangs on and won't let go. The time is unspecifically in the future, the place is a small town in Michigan and the feeling is like being caught in a clenched fist. The one-man show relaxes now and then to make a joke or share a fond remembrance, but we're always back to this character desperate to grip us with his cautionary tale.

Actually, it's less a story than random reminiscences. Shards of a shattered life that Alexander Toussaint (Pitts-Wiley) holds up to catch a recognizable image of himself. Days before, the neutron bombs fell, killing most of the people but leaving all the property intact. Pursued all the way from Detroit by some nameless threat, Toussaint runs howling onto the stage in the auditorium of his old high school, the site of his athletic glory. He clicks on a tape recorder and, addressing us "future folks," he wanders in words over the rocky landscape of his life. Anecdotes, poems, racist incidents, laughter, a snatch of song or hymn. Some survivors are already getting sick, so he knows he doesn't have much longer to live.

Don't worry, this isn't Road Warrior Meets Kunta Kinte. The melodramatic set-up is only a way to intensify Toussaint's recollected events, place them in significant context. The real meat of the monologue, this theatrical gumbo, is in those of the loosely linked mini-tales that connect effectively with the audience. And there are plenty enough coming at us in 35 Miles from Detroit to get us where we live, whatever our race, creed or geographical origin. We're taken on an emotional roller coaster, and while we may end up pretty much where we got on, many of the sights along the way are well worth the ride.

Most heartfelt, and illuminating, is the theme that this narrative keeps returning to: the experience of growing up as a black man in white America. The summer heat that precipitated the 1967 Detroit riots is vivid in one poem, as is the resigned patience that sizzled away in the streets. Toussaint's choice of the Vietnam war rather than the civil rights war in Montgomery comes across convincingly as equivalent, what with the sublimated bonus of getting to shoot yellow men instead of white ones. Black rage gets brilliantly illuminated in the quiet voice of a baker briskly kneading dough. He does it from habit now, he says to the narrator, but originally it was "so I could go to bed each night knowing I hadn't killed anybody." Some of the most powerful descriptions -- because they are the most honest -- are the confessions of black-on-black racism and the descriptions of those affected. The adored light-skinned girls. The despised "ugly black kids" -- African-black and even poorer than Toussaint, who could stand one rung from the bottom on the status ladder at school.

Leavening this account is humor and the pleasant memories that brought the dying Toussaint back to his hometown. Pitts-Wiley does a funny imitation of the toothless Mr. Griff. He's an old codger whose rage mellowed into the realization that a black man can, as he put it, have his cake and eat it too, can "relax into being black." There were those soulful MoTown songs. And the preaching and hymn-singing in church, with Sister Prout strutting along and Deacon Wilson shouting and threatening lovingly. The post-apocalyptic mood is established by tattered and stained scraps of canvas and netting and camouflage in Pitts-Wiley's set design, and it is sustained by the brooding sound design of Paul Bisch and Jeremy Woodward's shadowy lighting.

Lots of messages and instructions are coming at us in 35 Miles from Detroit, so many that sometimes the anguish can bounce right off. But when Pitts-Wiley delivers them through the mouths of the people Toussaint recalls, both characters and sentiments come alive. Perhaps if one of them were telling Toussaint's story, it would be even more affecting.

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Pitts-Wiley's true stories

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