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“Striptease of the Soul”
offers some tease, lot of soul
The Courier
By: Pam Chickering
January 1, 1998
You
can’t go to a production entitled “Striptease of the Soul” and not expect a
little controversy. For that matter, you can’t go to a Jinx Davis production
and not expect a little controversy. Controversy has been a tool of the
trade for Davis as long as she’s had the Mode Theater in Waterloo. While the
latest promise delivers on that promise, along with the rawness comes much
tenderness, as Davis reaches back to her childhood roots. “There was one
thing my father would not tolerate, and that was being ordinary,” the Waterloo
actress explains. Her father’s consuming passion for the extraordinary had a
dual legacy; one that schooled the family in creativity and seasoned them for
conflict, but at the same time helped them consume the family bonds.
Davis gives the audience an image of her father, just out of high school, waiting in prison as a conscientious objector to World War II. His father, a preacher, couldn’t conceive how his son could object to serving his country; his mother figured it would give him time to think. Ironically it only took a toilet to bring down this man of steel ideals—more specifically—the demeaning toilet next to his bed and the incessant sound of flushing. Waiting in his cell night after day, listening to toilets flush, her father determined to go to war—if he could fly B-17s. On his last mission, her father’s plane went down in an apple tree, and he landed in the Stalag 17 prison camp. As instructed by the service back in America, he wrote coded letters back home, referring to cousins who never existed and things that never happened to give the Americans an idea of the location of the prisoner war camp. The letters should have been intercepted by the Americans and used as information; however, somehow they got to his family anyway, and they determined that the war had made him mad.
In a
sense, the war did infuse him with an even more intense sense of purpose. When
released from the camp, he only weighed 72 pounds, but he had a vision, one that
would eventually lead him to become a professor of children’s literature in
Madison. After the war, he opened a preschool in a huge Victorian house,
welcoming a motley crew of students, at least in the eyes of the community:
Jewish children born in concentration camps, black children, hearing impaired
children. He was determined to give his preschool the best modern education
available. When the townsfolk learned this meant doing public performance and
art displays and learning with a chimp—the idea being that the chimp’s fast rate
of learning would inspire the very young children—they did their best to run the
Davises out.
Meanwhile, Jinx grew up as many children do, making a
magical kingdom in her back yard.
“These were the stories I took to my first stage, Indian Hollow, a stone’s throw from the village dump,” Davis tells the audience. “Every single thing the villager’s trucked into Indian Hollow, we trucked back out. By the end of our second summer, we had a stage fit for Shakespeare.” With her hands and her face, Davis creates the scene surely as if it hangs in the air: a makeshift stage of old furniture, framed by trees and imbued with a certain magic of a child’s imagination. “It had a captain’s walk where you could climb right into the trees,” Davis says. “On this stage we played out the great dramas of Harriet Tubman, of Florence Nightingale, of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan…”
Because of the intensity Davis brought to roles, even as a child, she had her pick of the parts. No one else would stoop to eat dirt to play that wild, unreachable child, Helen Keller. “I would feel the dark, stubborn will of Helen Keller, even before she had concepts,” Davis recalled, her eyes going blank, and an angry, puzzled look settling between her brows. Immediately, she became the blind and deaf girl at the moment of revelation, when teacher Annie Sullivan ran the girl’s hands under the pump, signing “W-A-T-E-R” into her palm until she broke through to that lonely brain.
Davis laughed, and she broke the spell she’d woven, confiding in a child’s proud, delighted tones, “The next day, I got to be Annie Sullivan.”
Davis reenacted the pivotal moment of Sullivan’s life, at the orphanage, when the Irish-American immigrant realized that her brother no longer slept next to her. Blind herself, Sullivan entered the huge room where the orphanage kept the corpses of the children who died until they could be buried in the spring. “Annie touched in the darkness every body until she found her Jimmy. The she lay next to him. That is where they found her.” Out of this harrowing experience, Davis says, Sullivan draws a core of great strength and a love of life so strong she could send that electrifying conduit of life into Keller to reach the girl utterly cut off from humanity.
“When the call for supper came, I always let everyone go before me,” Davis says, returning to her scene at the homemade childhood stage.
“When I was truly alone, I’d climb up the captain’s walk, where I would enter that wonderful realm of infinite time,” Davis says, stepping onto a chair, which becomes the captain’s walk, which becomes the doorway to another realm. “Just like the first paragraph in Homer’s Odyssey, I would reach out to the muses,” Davis says, her voice changing from a child’s tone to a deep majestic call, to a rising wind. “Sing to me, oh muse, child of the whirlwind that I am. I have witnessed the darkness…” “Now I am stuck in Mrs. Kauffman’s fourth grade and I am not seen or heard for what I am!” she continues, eliciting chuckles in the midst of all that drama. On one final, “Oh muse, sing to me!” she slows and drops her voice so it mimics the fall of a crashing, burning plane.
As
Davis shares childhood fantasies and reenters the world of creation and
creativity, she strikes a chord with the audience, reminding them of worlds they
created as children, and how fully they lived in these worlds without benefit of
prop or costume or proper stage—worlds still within reach if they try, she
suggests.
In between the stories and recollections through which
Davis examines her childhood and heritage, musical performer
Sterling Jones provides a funky, touching counter-part with original tunes that
span from bluesy to pop. Dressed in a white tuxedo, the performer has an
easy, almost humorous stage presence even as she shares songs that go to the
core of her being: of rebellion, of commitment and love. “Gonna burn this
city down,” she sings in one energetic song, of defying tradition, and in
another song, turns tender. “Where is your home?” one song asks, answering that
the singer has made a home in her heart. On another, she adds a funky, bluesy
loop that sounds like a chuckle, singing an invitation to love.
As with every Jinx Davis show, “Striptease of the Soul” will remain a work in progress throughout the production, but audiences can be assured they will get a little tease, a little nudge out of their usual perspective and a lot of humor and soul.