Getting along PBRC’s Jar the Floor is wise and witty BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Jar the Floor By Cheryl J. West. Directed by Marla Blakely. With Cilla J. Bento, Angela Nash Wade, Nehassaiu deGannes, Sheila Allen-Styles, and Elizabeth Keiser. At Providence Black Repertory Company through March 6.
	Finding the funny It’s about time. Bob Colonna is a very entertaining guy, so his Newport songs and yuks revue at Firehouse Theater has been long overdue. As a longtime audience member around here, I remember with affection a British dance hall revue Colonna directed and performed many years ago. That was after the former Trinity Rep veteran ran the Rhode Island Shakespeare Theatre, known as TRIST, from 1971 to 1990. When we’ve chatted, as often as not he’s had a new joke to share. (Ask him to tell the one about the philanderer and the basket of snails.) No wonder Bob Colonna got into this line of work. He’s the adopted son of the late Jerry Colonna, the cigar-waggling entertainer of the 1940s and ’50s with the larger-than-life handlebar mustache and goggle-eyed comic persona. Bob first performed with him when he was 15, learning all about comic timing onstage while his knees were knocking. "I did a lot of stuff in high school, a lot of school plays and things like that — I was the class clown, ham, pain-in-the-ass kid," he admits. That’s about what you’d expect, he says, from people who know him. "Dad, he was encouraging in ways," Colonna says. "He taught me some great routines when I was a kid, some bits that he had done. Like I had an Italian dialect routine that I used to do all the time." He is speaking in his East Side living room, surrounded by photographs, many with his father. Leaning against a wall are albums dated with masking tape, lost scrapbooks of clippings from Jerry Colonna’s career that he recently recovered on eBay. (But you can read all about that on these pages after Bob completes a biography of the man, which his publisher expects by the next January.) This time I wanted to talk with Colonna about comedy. He’s been at it quite a while, turning 64 as he did on February 20. Although this is a man who insists, "I’m not funny. You know? I have to really work at it." He watches and admires and steals, he says. The interview is supposed to be about him, but he spends time detailing the comical inventiveness of actor Mark Carter, whom he directed in The Winter’s Tale last year at Firehouse Theater. So what makes for funny? "One thing I learned from doing Shakespeare is that everything has punch lines — see, tragedy has punch lines," he replies. "Tragedy is exactly like comedy: you have to set it up and knock it over." Other modes are exaggeration and the unexpected — although, he points out, "There are a million really good jokes to violate both of those principles, because no one can nail it down." But, he adds, "The greatest movie probably ever made was Young Frankenstein. Because just when you think you know where you are, Mel [Brooks] pulls the rug out again. "Carol Burnett said that comedy is tragedy plus time — you know, what’s horrible in the moment is funny the next day," Colonna observes. "Mel puts it another way. He said: ‘Tragedy is if I cut my finger and I go to Mount Sinai and I have to have stitches. Comedy is if you fall down an open manhole and die — what do I care?’ " What makes for good comedy? Hmmm. Colonna thinks about it some more and comes up with a crucial factor that Trinity Rep founder Adrian Hall was always citing about successful acting in general: honesty. Colonna talks about a comic opportunity in Macbeth that is usually neglected. Macbeth has killed the king and is talking to someone who doesn’t yet know. "Lennox says it’s been a crazy night, we’ve had thunder and the wind tore the roof off our houses. And Macbeth says, ‘It’s a rough night.’ " And the implied sound of a drum thunk punctuates the secret joke. The list goes on. Subverting expectations is the last thing he mentions, with his favorite example. He’s proud of a moment he came up with in The Seagull, in an early ’90s Trinity production, when he tricked the audience. Playing an old man in a wheelchair, after a long pause his hand falls, so we all think he is dead. But then after a beat, we hear: "Z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z." Bob Colonna laughs loudly at that memory. As he well deserves to. — B.R.

Who can get enough of family dramedies? We’re comforted that families of others are as screwed up as ours; we’re relieved that some are even worse. And along the way we might even pick up a trick or two about getting along. Jar the Floor accomplishes all of the above at the Providence Black Repertory Company and throws in some belly laughs for good measure.

We meet four African-American women of four generations, with a white woman in the pot for color and cultural contrast. Madear Dawkins (Cilla J. Bento) is about to celebrate her 80th birthday, so the female clan is convening. Trouble is, everyone wants to be the matriarch and boss the others around — or at least tell off one or two of them.

Madear has been taken in to live with her granddaughter, MayDee Lakeland (Nehassaiu deGannes). At a college, MayDee "teaches black people how to be black," in the words of her flippant mother, Lola Bird (Angela Nash Wade). Driving thousands of miles for the celebration is MayDee’s daughter, Vennie Lakeland (Sheila Allen-Styles), a gypsy-garbed free spirit. She has brought along a friend, Raisa (Elizabeth Keiser), leading to speculation about her sexual orientation.

That’s the straightforward familial relationships. The emotional ones are pretty tangled. Here’s a sampling. MayDee resents Lola some for not taking in Madear but mostly for paying more attention to the men in her life — one or two who paid the young MayDee more attention than was welcome — than to her daughter. In turn, Lola resents MayDee for "thinking that every man comes dipped in horseshit" and for not appreciating that her mother made sure a man was in the house to help put food in her mouth and clothes on her back.

With all that negative-example training for raising a daughter, MayDee still doesn’t get along with her own. Vennie dropped out of college with one semester to go, a slap in the face to a mother who worked extra jobs to pay for it. She wants to be a singer and travel to Europe with her new friend to start a career, if MayDee will give her what remains of her education money.

As for the doddering Madear, she slips in and out of this world and Alzheimer’s. Bento makes her very funny rather than pathetic, jabbing the remote toward Lola at one point, annoyed that the mute isn’t working. Madear won’t accept that her husband died nearly a year earlier, and she stomps her foot to "jar the floor" and wake him up. She gets along best with Raisa — the white visitor she calls "Raisin" — who is the only one who will spend time and listen to her. Madear keeps talking about going to her non-existent home, and she’s hoping that this stranger will take her.

Between the playwright and director Marla Blakey, each actor gets plenty of opportunities to impress us, and they all accomplish that. Lola is the most flamboyant, sipping Seagram’s Seven like tea, which loosens a loose tongue even further. Wade gets great lines, as when Lola criticizes her daughter’s overprocessing her hair and fantasizes "nappy-headed angels" in heaven shouting "free at last!" As spunky old mirror-breaking Madear, Bento is a constant crowd-pleaser, wise-cracking and seeing through every pretense. DeGannes makes the middle-generation mother, MayDee, oblivious through her self-righteousness.

It is the outsider who gets the most outlandish set piece, and Keiser takes full opportunity. Raisa has been drawn out of herself, to the extent that she is eager to bare her breast to them — literally, to display her mastectomy and prove she is no longer ashamed of the scar. So we’re prepared when she acts out how badly her own Jewish mother can behave, holding a table knife to her chest and asking why the ingrates around her don’t just plunge it in to end her misery. Keiser had the opening night audience howling.

Set design by Lisa Pegnato gives us a realistic sense of a comfortable home, a necessary background for all this inner discomfort. Costume design by Kyla Coburn is on the button for each of these characters, from the cowry-bedecked Lola to the walking Istanbul bazaar that is Vennie.

The play itself is carelessly written in places, but not enough to spoil the whole. (One example is the on-again, off-again vacillation of MayDee about giving Vennie that hard-earned education money — for a while we are jerked around as needlessly as her daughter.)

But this production and its talented cast and director make the evening well worthwhile. Bring your mother or daughter along and add your own dialogue later.