In terms of its words, “Hang Time,” by Zora Howard, is a very subtle play. Its language is rich, and the themes that its characters usher forth chime suggestively, like harsh but precisely rung bells, never quite settling on a resolution. Its imagery, however, is awful and overt: even before the show starts, as the audience files in, three Black men are hanging in midair, their legs dangling, the motion of their bodies almost stilled. Walking into the small, dark theatre at the Flea and finding this scene is like happening upon the fresh aftermath of a crime. As the play gets going, it becomes like looking on helplessly—or, worse, passively, as a kind of entertainment—while a lynching ensues.
The stage direction in Howard’s script seems to make the matter of her setting even blunter: the play takes place “underneath an old, wide tree.” But in this production—directed by Howard, with scenic design by Neal Wilkinson—the actors are held up from behind by a metal contraption. No tree or other entity, living or dead, is visible above their heads. No ropes. Sometimes the men’s legs are free to sway, but a black platform periodically rises to meet their feet, enabling them to stand. The lighting design, by Reza Behjat, is stylishly minimal, and makes it so that the apparatus, black and glinting steel, is often nearly unseen. Maybe this is how we carry out a warning example of a showy death in the technological age: with machinelike efficiency and an iPhone’s sleek curvature and silence, leaving all those unfashionable knots and organic materials behind.
Meanwhile, the men speak. Blood (Cecil Blutcher) is a young man trying to make it, full of humor and earnest intensity. He’s already had his fair share of trouble—neglectful father, sick grandmother, overworked mother, hungry siblings. But his father’s wanderlust has been passed down to him, like a gene. He wants to get out of “here”—where that is, exactly, is never specified—and get on the move, go travelling. He’s heard of pink rivers and red oceans, surreal locales accessible only by a yearning for adventure and an impatience with local comforts. He wants to see it all for himself.
Slim (Akron Watson) is a middle-aged trickster, the kind of crossroads-dwelling creature we associate with the blues, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, Slim loves. When he’s not bragging about his sexual exploits, or giving the other guys great snowdrifts of shit, he’s belting out songs. His relationship with melody is inconsistent—it’s obvious that Watson can actually sing, and he sometimes strains to make himself sound bad—but his passion is unimpeachable. Little wonder: he’s seen and done some terrible things. At one point, he cries out:
Bird (Dion Graham), the eldest and world-weariest of the trio, isn’t charmed by Slim’s effusion of emotion. The men’s banter is typical of “Hang Time” ’s method, heavy on humor until the jokes run their riverine course toward pain.
That’s true: no, you really don’t want to know the deep, burbling source of the blues. The kind of grief that urges you to song is inelegant, a hot devil nearly impossible to wrestle into form. The right note in that scenario—the kind of experience with which these men, in their different ways, all seem too familiar—might sound out of tune. Moving on and staying alive mean, for the most part, steering clear of that abyss. Bird, for instance, tries to counsel the younger men to settle down with a good woman and let the rhythms of a conventional life console them. “When you weary of the world, who gonna hold your head in her lap?” he pointedly asks. “Who gonna make sure you fed mind, body and spirit?”
At one point, Bird squabbles with Slim about the blues—the music is a grinding, perpetually active metaphor in “Hang Time.” Slim asserts that Freddie King is the “greatest bluesman of all time.” “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Bird says. “I need to know who it is got in your head that Freddie King was ever considered to be THE King of the Blues.” He argues, instead, for Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson. “Time, nigga,” Slim replies. “The general populace, that’s who.” The dispute isn’t about singers, not really. It’s a thin tarp thrown over the unsayable; so is this show. Each time one of the men is forced to the brink of his deepest wounds, he starts to twitch and shake and twist at the neck. The physicality of the lynching tree comes rushing back.
So, where are these men? What kind of speech are they engaged in? They often ask each other which day of the week it is, with a touching and seemingly avoidant confusion. The play runs for only an hour, but feels dense with their reminiscences and world views, their trepidations and buried fears. They seem stuck not only by way of their unmentioned hangings but in some gray gap between life and death, between wistful retrospection and wounded involvement in the dailiness of things.
This might be a kind of Purgatory, where talk and memory and proximity to trauma are cleansing agents that, by degrees, lift the soul toward Paradise. Or it could be a final act of protest, a gabby defiance against the towering contemporary oaks from which people like these three still sometimes swing: overzealous policing, for-profit prisons, low wages, negligent medical advice, unshakable ennui. If you keep talking, they can’t close the lid on your tomb. Cutting jokes and resigned complaint shield against the void.
The unchanging positioning of the three men’s bodies—a closely clustered triangle, with Blood in front and Slim and Bird slightly behind, flanking him like a pair of living wings—suggests classical paintings of the Crucifixion. As the story goes—Bird would know this, as he’s a God-fearing man—two thieves were hung alongside Jesus. One of them asks for a show of power: Christ should leave his cross, saving himself and the criminals. (The scornful request reminds me of some famous lines from W. H. Auden: “We who must die demand a miracle. / How could the Eternal do a temporal act, / The Infinite become a finite fact.”) The other, more simply, asks to be thought of: “Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom.” Perhaps we’re all stuck between those poles: a doomed will to power over an already certain fate; a hope that memory, our unstable shadow, is the route to everlasting life.
More than anything, I thought of a funeral service, with its unfair mismatches of speech. The mourners try and fail to put a life into words: an out-of-tune blues. And the beloved’s body, quiet and changed, unreal in its onstage presence, sits, unable to testify on its own behalf. But what if the dead could rise, if only for the hour or so it takes to put on a show? They might struggle to the podium and adjust the microphone and deliver their own eulogies. It’s a sweet and impossible fantasy, from both angles: to see and hear the lost one last time, to speak one more word for yourself, to clarify. Maybe, though, they’d just splash back into the waters of simple conversation. What day is it? they might ask. Nice weather. ♦
