STAGE: Lackawanna Blues

Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s one-man (plus guitarist) show Lackawanna Blues is a remarkable performance, an engaging memoir in which he recreates the scenes and characters of his growing up in an extraordinary boardinghouse in 1950s upstate New York. With an absent father and a mother barely in the picture, Ruben was effectively raised by “Nanny”, an indomitable woman who ran several boarding houses and a car service, who played angel of mercy to countless humans and animals in need, and who seemed to run her own 1950s “underground railroad” from her native Virginia to Lackwanna when the metal of the rust belt was gleaming new and industrial jobs were plentiful. Nanny is the heart and soul of the play, but given definition by the great variety of characters who populated the boardinghouse, and their stories. With minimal sets and props, just with changes in voice and posture, Santiago-Hudson brings to life a kaleidoscope of characters on stage, painting a vivid picture of how these people were, and how they appeared in the eyes of a young boy. Through most of this, Chris Thomas King sits on a stool on the side, playing out the blues music of Bill Sims Jr., providing the soundtrack for this story as well as the occasional sound effect. Santiago-Hudson’s delivery is subtly and deftly married to the music, mostly natural speech but sometimes falling into rhythmic patter, and occasionally punctuated by a harmonica solo, but at every point authentic blues. By the end of the play, you felt like Nanny’s boardinghouse was a kind of family, and you’d just got to meet them all. This point was brought home by a gallery of actual photographs, a family album of sorts, on display in the lobby, which so many of us in the audience lingered after the show, delighted to see photos of people we felt like we’d gotten to know.