Sardi Klein
Adrienne Torf and June Jordan
As the Fountain Theatre’s proverbial curtain lifts, cast members distribute notepads and pens to audience members, signaling the immersive, interactive nature of the impending stage spectacle.
“Poetry is a political action,” says actor Naseem Etemad, setting forth the credo of June Jordan, the poet, essayist and librettist who is the subject of this live performance. The show, called Poetry for the People: The June Jordan Experience, is a multi-media play with live music now having its West Coast premiere at one of Los Angeles’ most acclaimed playhouses, just in time for Black History Month.
Jordan was born in New York City in 1936, the daughter of Jamaican and Panamanian immigrants, and grew up in the city’s two largest Black communities, Harlem and Bedford Stuyvesant. Imbued with her disciplinarian father’s love of literature, she went from New York City public schools to education at an elite New England prep school, Barnard College, and the University of Chicago. She eventually authored twenty-seven books of poetry and essays while teaching at universities including Yale University and the University of California, Berkeley, where she founded the Poetry for the People program in 1991.
Believing poems should be for the masses, Jordan used her way with words to illuminate causes such as racial equality, Palestinians’ struggles, feminism, and gay rights in essays and reportage, as well as poetry. Jordan, who was inducted in 2019 on the LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument, wrote about segregated Mississippi and South African apartheid for The New York Times and, as is mentioned in the play, she became a columnist for The Progressive in 1989.
As The Progressive’s then-editor, Matt Rothschild, would later write: “I remember when I met her [she was] giving a talk at Helen C. White in Madison on a sweltering, suffocating evening, but I was so enthralled with her that I bought three of her poetry books in the hallway after her talk and then the next morning convinced the stolid editorial staff to take her on” as a regular contributor.
Jordan would continue to write for The Progressive until her death in 2002 at age sixty-five, after a long battle with breast cancer. “The topics of Jordan’s writings ranged from self-love to state violence,” noted Barbara Ransby, an associate professor of African American studies and history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, in a tribute op-ed. “She was a constant presence and a consistent voice on behalf of the dispossessed. In the 1970s, she opposed racism in the United States, war in Vietnam, and colonialism in Africa. She wrote on behalf of welfare-rights activists and Attica’s prison rebels.”
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Areon Mobasher
The ensemble in ‘Poetry for the People.’
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Areon Mobasher
Naseem Etemad in ‘Poetry for the People.’ In the background is an archival photo of June Jordan.
Poetry for the People vividly brings Jordan and her oeuvre alive using a variety of techniques. Film clips, including interviews with the poet and Angela Davis (who insisted that Jordan play tennis with her), are projected onto four screens (media design by Deja Collins). Six multi-cultural women thespians (America Covarrubias, Naseem Etemad, Kita Grayson, Mackenzie Mondag, Savannah Shoenecker, and Janet Song) reenact Jordan and some of the figures who crossed paths with her, including civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer (as portrayed by Grayson), about whom Jordan penned a 1972 biography.
Amidst the vibrant mise-en-scène, theatergoers are twice tasked with writing their own poems on the spot and then asked to recite them aloud.
Music, which was also important to Jordan, is featured prominently in the play. Midway through the almost two-hour, one-act production, Jordan’s creative collaborator and real-life partner of nineteen years, playwright and composer Adrienne Torf, joins the ensemble to play the digital keyboards. Fragments of what Torf called “their full-length documentary opera Bang Bang Über Alles” are performed onstage.
In 1995, Jordan wrote the libretto for composer John Adams’s opera about California’s Northridge earthquake I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, produced by Peter Sellars.
Presenting Poetry for the People at the award-winning Fountain Theatre is a natural fit. According to its mission statement, the space was established in 1990 to “develop provocative new works or explore a unique vision of established plays that reflect the immediate concerns and cultural diversity of contemporary Los Angeles and the nation.”
It could be said that while Emily Dickinson reclusively scribed poetry in her bedroom, the outspoken Jordan wrote poems in the streets. Deftly directed by Raymond O. Caldwell, Poetry for the People is a worthy theatrical evocation of an activist and artist whom contemporary Alice Walker once likened to Pablo Neruda, calling her “the universal poet.”
Poetry for the People: The June Jordan Experience is being performed through March 29 at Los Angeles’s Fountain Theatre. Tickets are “name your price.” On February 24, the production travels to Berkeley to perform at The Freight in collaboration with University of California, Berkeley, to anchor a week of campus programming celebrating Jordan. This performance will be livestreamed on The Freight’s website, but only on the day and time it takes place.