It takes a larger-than-life character to fill a stage by himself.
Akin Babatunde and Nate Jacobs pull it off smashingly.
Both star in one-man comedies during this year’s run of the National Black Theatre Festival—Babatunde as Avon Von Schmidt, a man with the unusual hobby of attending strangers’ funerals, in Obituary, and Jacobs as Aunt Rudele, a loud busybody, in Aunt Rudele’s Family Reunion.
As Obituary opens, we catch Von Schmidt reading the morning paper. He strolls around the sparse set in silky blue pajamas, lecturing on the nuances of black funerals.
He should know—he scans the obituary section regularly, selecting services to attend and keeping the programs as souvenirs in a shoebox at home.
“Death is a part of life,” he says. “I just take it a little further, that’s all. I go as a spectator.”
He mimics the fire-and-brimstone preachers, the wailing relatives, the off-key singers and the gossipy mourners. “I hope it wasn’t purple,” he says, imitating one of bereaved as they worry about the deceased’s lipstick color. “Purple makes you look dead.”
Babatunde’s vocals, resplendent as Von Schmidt’s jammies, had much of the audience clapping and singing along, cackling with recognition as he struck up hymns and wove anecdotes—the widow who wore a peach-colored dress to her husband’s funeral, the kids who showed up in T-shirts, the program so slick it looked like something out of Ebony magazine. “Why is it most black people have at least one story to tell about a funeral?” he asks.
As Aunt Rudele, Jacobs conjures an opinionated meddler, busy telling everyone what she thinks during a family reunion. “You are family. I’ve got to help my family,” she tells a relative who has lost weight—too much, Rudele thinks.
Both shows are shrewd and humorous character sketches of what it means to be black, tradition-bound and part of a large family. They ring true and sharp: if you don’t know people like them, you know their stories.
■ Obituary, presented by the Black Academy of Arts & Letters (Dallas), will be performed on a double bill with Aunt Rudele’s Family Reunion, written and performed by Nate Jacobs, at 3 and 8 p.m. today at Dillard Auditorium, the Anderson Center, Winston-Salem State University. For tickets, $37, call 723-7907.
■ Laura Giovanelli can be reached at 727-7302 or at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).