Floridian: Keeping up with Jones

Keeping up with Jones

Bob Devin Jones, directing a play by African-American, like himself, initially was uncomfortable with a black on black perspective. Now he finds that From the Mississippi Delta offers what he artistically seeks: a sharing of ethnicity.

By JOHN FLEMING

ST. PETERSBURG -- The last month or so has been like a local coming-out party for Bob Devin Jones, an actor, director and playwright. At 46, Jones has had an extensive career in the theater, with enough accomplishments to fill a five-page resume. "The last time I had a civilian job was 1988," he says.

But only lately has Jones, who settled in St. Petersburg four years ago, been involved in bay area theater. In mid-January, he performed in his one-man show, Uncle Bends: a home-cooked negro narrative, as part of the WordBRIDGE Playwrights Lab at Eckerd College. Now his staging of From the Mississippi Delta by Endesha Ida Mae Holland is playing at American Stage.

"I spend most of my time in airports," said Jones, who continues in his longtime position as artistic associate at the Sacramento Theatre Company in California and directs at other regional theaters. "It has been nice the last few months to work in the theater during the day and then go home at night."

Jones moved to southeast St. Petersburg after meeting his partner-to-be at the Chattaway restaurant while directing an all-black adaptation of Strindberg's Miss Julie at American Stage in 1997.

It's no coincidence that Jones has been engaged exclusively for black-themed plays here. That's largely the case elsewhere, too, a fact of life for any African-American who has pursued a career in serious theater, from Paul Robeson on. Jones, for instance, did a lot of Shakespeare as an actor, but he was never asked to perform the one role he most wanted.

"I've always wanted to play Hamlet," he said. "Othello I've done, but never Hamlet. Now, as a director, I'd love to do Chekhov, but I don't get those opportunities to do, say, Three Sisters -- and not Three Sistahs!" (Jones' reference is to the tendency of theaters to mount misguidedly modern adaptations of the classics.)

In an effort to redress the institutional racism of American theater, some black playwrights stipulate that their work be staged by a black director. Perhaps the most important such writer is August Wilson, whose works on 20th century African-American life have been widely produced.

"In a way, it was good because it allowed a lot of black directors to get into theaters that they wouldn't normally get into. It helped me," said Jones, who has directed Wilson's Fences and The Piano Lesson in Sacramento and Memphis.

Another playwright who is picky about who does her plays is Holland, who insists on a black director and cast for From the Mississippi Delta. Jones previously directed it in Sacramento, Memphis, Dallas and Rochester, N.Y.

"The first time I read the play, when I was given it to direct in Sacramento, I was p---," he said. "The black director gets the black play, and I'm getting a play I don't much understand or like. But I ended up discovering some great things about myself in it."

From the Mississippi Delta, with a cast of three women, is a series of vignettes that mirror the biography of the author, who went from abject poverty and abuse as a child to the civil rights movement to an academic career.

"This is a play that sits on the page very simply, but cumulatively it reaches a nice rapport with the audience if the women put their own experience on the story," Jones said. "I saw a production of it in Seattle where they did it kind of like a Leslie Uggams number, with a lot of sass. You can do it that way, but I really want to get the play to a point where it's shared, not performed."

Sharing was the aim in Jones' one-man show, Uncle Bends, in which he cooked up a meal of rice and beans for the audience while relating the stories of everyday black people, including a railroad cook, a quilt-making grandmother, a shoeshine boy, a Bible-thumping preacher and a slave woman.

A touch of satire seasons the performance. Jones dresses in white shirt and apron and red bowtie, evoking Uncle Ben of rice fame, and there are references to other politically incorrect black icons, such as Aunt Jemima and Uncle Willie (Cream of Wheat).

"The play is slyly political," Roberta Levitow, who directed the premiere in 1995, told American Theatre magazine, "because it takes on the legacy of those people who are sometimes characterized as the compromisers or assimilators or the sell-outs, and it asks: What was their behavior really comprised of? It's a debate about how to deal with one's racial identity."

Deep affection permeates the writing, which the playwright drew from memories of listening to family stories. His family, whose roots are in Louisiana and Arkansas, moved to California in the 1940s and Jones grew up in Los Angeles.

"I like a narrative that deploys some other information at the same time as it tells a story," he said. "I thought the best way to convey that was not to be strident and angry but to create this avuncular figure."

In Jones' view, his play is about forgiveness. "The setting up of the play was just these people who make a way out of no way, people who know how to have forgiveness, for themselves and for their perpetrators, and try to get on with it."

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At a glance: From the Mississippi Delta continues through Feb. 18 at American Stage, 211 Third St. S, St. Petersburg. Curtain: 7:30 p.m. Wed.-Thur.; 8 p.m. Fri.-Sat.; 3 p.m. Sat.-Sun. Tickets are $20-$28. Call (727) 823-7529.