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THEATER REVIEW: The Adventures of Fishy Waters, starring Guy Davis
The time is the Great Depression. Guy Davis' one-man play takes us through the experiences of a talented, optimistic despite all he has seen and heard, black man from the south traveling and living rough, trying to make a living the best he can.
THEATER REVIEW: The Adventures of Fishy Waters, starring Guy Davis
Our hero introduces himself this way, “I’m Fishy Waters, I’m a bluesman and teller of tales. And there ain’t no story so big nor tale so tall that I can’t tell it! I just hopped off that freight train that came through your town.”
The time is the Great Depression. Guy Davis’ one-man play takes us through the experiences of a talented, optimistic despite all he has seen and heard, black man from the south traveling and living rough, trying to make a living the best he can.
“I’m a hobo, not a bum! There’s a difference. A bum don’t wanna work. A hobo will work at any job he can find.” The struggles and the ways to edge ahead of other hungry men are pure comedy, experiences common to all out of work when it’s an employer’s market.
Audience interaction is part of the show. Fishy, proffering his flask says to an audience member, “Here! Hold this! It’s bothering my pocket,” as hit seats himself to pick. A group of pretty women are also singled out. “Look there!” pointing into the third row or so, he counts them off, “There’s my wife, my fiancée and my girlfriend, all sitting together. Don’ know how that happened but I’m glad you all are getting along!” He tells stories that are so steeped in tradition we know where they are going, it’s the characters he recalls with the telling that delight. The son of Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis has a gift for dialect as well as the physical ways of to representing dozens of different characters, not a single one resembling the other.
Jim Crow was alive and well and pushing everybody around back then. We laugh at stories of the fella who slapped a white man and how he lived to tell about it. Things are going pretty well, laughing and enduring, up until the lynching story. Comical turns of phrase still pop up, that’s how the teller talks, but the mood can be nothing but somber with no way out but intermission.
Davis loves the country blues and this show is vehicle for keeping players whose styles are as distinct as the characters in the stories alive. John Hurt’s “Candy Man” shows gets the audience roaring along in response. Fishy says, “Robert Johnson? Him, he couldn’t play until he met the devil at the crossroads” and launches into “Hellhound on my Trail.’” This show is about as downhome an experience as you’ll ever get in an Equity theater.
The Adventures of Fishy Waters, through Feb. 26, $50, Crossroads Theatre, 7 Livingston Ave., New Brunswick, NJ, 732-545-8100, crossroadstheatrecompany.org.
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