Offscript - Hand-to-mouth resuscitation

The shocking thing about the New Jomandi’s decision to suspend its 25th season is that, sadly, it’s not very shocking.

It’s a major disappointment that Atlanta’s beleaguered African-American theater should cancel all four shows of its silver anniversary season. And it’s especially unfortunate that the Aug. 28 announcement came only three weeks before its world premiere of local playwrights Faye McDonald Smith and Janice Coombs Reid’s Unfinished Business — a title that now seems all too fitting.

Unfortunately, financial and leadership problems have plagued the theater for years, and Jomandi has canceled shows with depressing frequency. Seeing the theater struggle is like watching a medical patient suffer relapses just before being taken off life support.

Jomandi executive director and acting artistic director Byron Saunders says that while grants are up, the weak national economy has kept fundraising and ticket sales down. To have produced this season’s plays would have exacerbated the theater’s debt, which is about $50,000-$60,000, down from an estimated $170,000 in 2001. “Why go deeper into debt when you’re so close to retiring that debt?” asks Saunders. He believes that the choice to focus on fundraising and redevelopment will benefit the theater’s health in the long-term.

Jomandi’s lingering problems go beyond an anemic economy, however. Co-founder and producing director Thomas W. Jones left the company in 2000 and artistic director Marsha Jackson-Randolph moved on the following year. The theater has yet to name a permanent artistic director (Saunders holds the title in an interim capacity), and it changed its name from Jomandi Productions to The New Jomandi following a dispute with the theater’s founders over ownership of the “Jomandi” name.

The name “New” Jomandi seems like a misnomer given how its recent years have relied heavily on remounts (three in its past season alone). Granted, an ailing theater should play it safe, and next spring’s planned revival of Samm-Art Williams’ Home, as part of the Alliance Theatre’s City Series, would have neatly established Jomandi’s return to relevance. Saunders says that it’s not likely — but not impossible — that Jomandi can still stage Home at the Hertz Stage.

But even without its many cancellations, Jomandi’s programming has lacked inspiration over the past five years. The company has relied on bland buppie dramedies like Jackson-Randolph’s Sisters (staged in 1999 and 2002), historical one-actor shows like Ali and musical revues like Ain’t Misbehavin’. You may see wonderful players at a Jomandi show, but you’re more likely to see a challenging play by a black playwright at 7 Stages or Horizon. Jomandi’s plan to stage Pulitzer-winner Suzan Lori-Parks’ In the Blood in 2002 would have been an exception — but it too was canceled.

Saunders and Jomandi’s board of trustees have made a valiant effort to keep Jomandi alive after such ongoing difficulties, and it would be a shame for Atlanta to lose a 25-year-old African-American arts institution. But if Jomandi were to permanently close its doors, would that be worse than if it continued in a perpetually ailing, artistically uninspiring state? At some point, the doctors and loved ones of a critically ill patient have to decide to put “Do Not Resuscitate” on the chart.

Still, theaters can survive seemingly fatal wounds. Onstage Atlanta lost its permanent space on Courtland, drifted homeless for years and saw upheaval in its artistic leadership. But now it’s settled in a new space where it’s producing plenty of shows and finding a surprise success with its Musicals in Concert series.

The same could happen for the New Jomandi. But only if it became a truly New Jomandi.

Start of Play

A week after Jomandi canceled its season, Not Merely Players presented its first professional production, Straightaway Dangerous. Founder/artistic director Gene-Gabriel Moore emphasizes that the company is by, for and about people with disabilities, but not to the exclusion of able-bodied artists.

Atlanta playwright G. Brent Darnell rewrote his script for Straightaway Dangerous to accommodate that fact that actress Kati Tanner has one leg. But that’s not what you first notice when Tanner enters as “A.J.” — you’re more drawn by her energy and punk costuming (including dog collar, tattoos and fishnet stocking).

The play follows a relationship between claustrophobic A.J. and her neighbor (Luis Hernandez), who has a long facial scar and chronic agoraphobia. The play’s lurid twists make it an odd choice for Not Merely Players’ first show, as the characters increasingly exploit each other’s phobias with an escalating — yet repetitious — series of cruelties. The characterizations feel overly influenced by movie melodramas like Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? and Psycho (which it quotes at length).

The best you can say for the bleak yet noisy Straightaway Dangerous is that it proves that Not Merely Players doesn’t feel compelled to stage “uplifting” works about overcoming disabilities, like The Miracle Worker, or something even more cliched.

curt.holman@creativeloafing.com


Off Script is a biweekly column on the Atlanta theater scene.