THE TIES THAT BIND
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“Overcome them with yes’s, undermine them with smiles,” Walter Gaines says, remembering his grandfather’s instructions. But Gaines, the businessman whose journey we follow in Inside the Belly of the Beast, finds that sharper weapons are required. Imaginatively and powerfully staged by Shirley Jo Finney (with help from John Culbert’s set and Robert Christen’s lights), Gaines’s workday is a whirlwind of derisive, masked white figures. His climb up the corporate ladder seems futile. A promotion involves being put in charge of a section of useless, faceless employees who are so passive they’re literally crippled, and it soon becomes clear Gaines has been chosen to be king in a court of fools. In dreamy sequences his alter ego (a cool James Bond figure) is seduced and used by a tipsy Lady Liberty, and John De Conquer (a legendary warrior-deliverer) watches fiercely, though always at a distance, as Gaines battles racial bias. Particularly effective is a scene on a subway train in which a homeboy named Malice (Darryl Alan Reed, the perfect portrait of overly friendly menace) suggests that Gaines has sold out his heritage to join a society that doesn’t want him. He’s been swallowed by the American Dream–or he has swallowed it. Either way, the price he pays is his identity.
He may as well be Willie Semple, the concerned husband and father in Watermelon Rinds who wants nothing more than to pack up his heritage and move into a better neighborhood. Willie had his wife and daughter pack up for a move some time ago; he exists in limbo, his future a dream, his past in packing cartons. Among the packed things are his sister’s straightening comb, a pair of leg irons, and an African totem stick. Nothing is forgotten, only hidden.
