Piano man Trinity taps into Fats Waller’s rich life BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Fats Waller would have appreciated the advice that director Kent Gash was giving his assembled actors. "When you feel yourself floundering," he said, "look into the eyes of the other human being you’re on the stage with."

This talk of frailty might have seemed incongruous to an outsider. The two men and three women he was speaking to had just finished a high-energy run-through of the revue Ain’t Misbehavin’ — at Trinity Repertory Company September 3 to October 10 — that could have made Lazarus hop up and shout. But Gash, a former actor himself, knows how shaky it can feel beneath the showmanship. And getting into the mind and spirit of Waller has reminded him how important the human connection was to the musical master.

Bluesman, jazzman, and stride piano paragon, Thomas Wright "Fats" Waller died in 1943 of pneumonia while traveling on a train to New York from a gig in California. Though only 39, he had been recording for 20 years, having accompanied blues legend Billie Smith and composed several Broadway musicals. A colorful and charismatic showman, he toured Europe with his band the Rhythm Club and appeared in numerous films. The son of a minister of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, his home base always remained Harlem.

Gash, 44, directed From the Mississippi Delta at Trinity Rep in 1994 and A Christmas Carol in 1995. Since then he has made a name for himself in New York with such productions as Miss Evers’ Boys at Melting Pot Theatre Company and Josephine’s Song, for which he co-wrote the libretto, at York Theatre. The associate artistic director of Alliance Theatre Company in Atlanta, he is co-author of the as-yet unproduced musical Langston in Harlem, which has been chosen for the National Alliance of Musical Theatre’s annual Festival of New Musicals in October. Gash will be directing Topdog/Underdog at Trinity in January.

The director spoke about his current production after rehearsal.

Q: As a revue, Ain’t Misbehavin’ seems failure-proof with the right talent. What are you trying to bring out of the production that another director might not go for or might not get?

A: I guess what I’ve always responded to in the show is beyond the sort of sheer brilliance of the music and the breadth and the complexity of the show’s musical voice. I think the show’s about a very particular abundance and singularity and sensuality. Fats Waller’s life was nothing if not fully and richly lived. I mean, he lived hard, he played hard, he loved hard. And not unlike rock stars and celebrities of all sorts from the beginning of time, he burned out pretty quickly. But he blazed brilliantly while he was alive. And I think that the implied message in the show, if you’re looking for one, is: live your life abundantly and celebrate just being alive. There is in every moment something to be celebrated. Even in the suffering, there’s something always to be celebrated. And I feel very deeply that that is an inherent African-American aesthetic. It’s an aesthetic that has driven a great deal of African-American creativity.

Q: In your director’s notes in the program, you point out appreciatively that Waller was a satirist. What are your favorite targets that he aimed at?

A: One of my favorite things is just the sort of endless duplicity and mercurial nature of human desire and attraction. "Ain’t Misbehavin’ " is, in fact, a song about somebody who is misbehaving, you know. It’s the person who’s vowing sort of serial monogamy but flirting in every moment while they’re vowing, all the same.

The need, the desire, the appetite is always there. How it plays out is never the same from song to song. What he finds in each lyric, in each song, is different. You can hear it in his voice, you can hear in what he does rhythmically. And he loves the element of surprise. He’s playing with rhythms and harmonics in a way that you can’t quite guess where the next note is going to fall or where the beat is going to fall. It’s very sophisticated, very subtle stuff. But you don’t have to be an intellectual to get it. You can just feel the sense of play in it. So that sense of humor and sense of play is what makes this work translate so beautifully to the stage. That sense of "Where are these chords going to resolve?" or "Are they going to resolve at all?" is inherently theatrical. Every song has a cliffhanger in it.

Q: Waller was quite a self-confident showman. But do you think he’d have developed his skills as well as he did without the encouragement of the Harlem Renaissance?

A: Hard to know. If you scratch an artist of any kind you’ll find mentors and teachers and nurturing environments. We’re born into one family biologically, but as we become adults, we evolve the family around us that we need in order to be able to develop our potential. It’s interesting: Fats Waller was the son of a minister who really wasn’t having any of this jazz and experimental, revolutionary kind of music that was pouring out of him. But the gift was too big. Couldn’t be stopped. So he started playing and probably living a very fast life at a very, very young age. I think he started when he was like 13. And even that contradiction was fascinating. He played the organ, he played the violin, he was a singer. Pretty wild.