Halley’s Comet got an earful last night, and thankfully, we got to eavesdrop on the many wise, moving, curmudgeonly and funny things that a virtuoso actor told it.
Said actor would be John Amos (Good Times, Roots). He has presented Halley’s Comet for 18 years in more than 300 American cities and several foreign countries, having kept the material remarkably fresh in the process.
Halley’s Comet will run through tonight at the Stevens Center.
Make every effort to see a show that got its legs at one of the first presentations of the National Black Theatre Festival—a fact for which Amos thanked the late Larry Leon Hamlin in program notes. Hamlin founded and ran the festival until his death in 2007.
Comet tells the story of John Henry Halley, an elderly man who travels to the top of a mountain to catch a glimpse of Halley’s Comet, which he saw before when he was a child.
He is eager to tell the comet what he has been up to for the past 76 years, and how the world has changed in that time.
Halley has lived—and then some, having married three times and fathered 14 children.
Two of his wives have passed on; three sons never came back from foreign wars; and a daughter died in Mississippi during the civil-rights struggles there.
The recollections about his family range from the tragically sad to the unbelievably comic.
He doesn’t just say that he lost a son to a nightmarish conflict in the Pacific (Amos likens it to a rain of blood, referring to American soldiers who shot Japanese paratroopers before they landed); he reads a moving letter about it from his son.
The funny recollections about Halley’s family will have you in stitches as when, for example, he recounts how he had to evade the brother chaperones that surrounded his first wife at a dance.
Live by the Golden Rule. Turn off the television and rely on your imagination. Look out for your own children as well as those in the neighborhood. Respect the environment.
These are not new insights, but when Amos relates them, he does so in a way that makes us sit up, laugh and perhaps shed a tear.
■ Ken Keuffel can be reached at 727-7337 or at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
■ John Amos will present Halley’s Comet at 3 and 8 p.m. today at the Stevens Center. Tickets, $42, are available at the box office at the Benton Convention Center and at the theater before the show.