Two of Eric Berryman’s favourite issues are ingesting tea and telling tales, each of which have been on the agenda on a current wet afternoon within the Manhattan neighborhood of SoHo.
“This primary infusion I’m going to do is simply to awaken the leaves and open issues up,” he mentioned, starting with the tea. “You may drink it, nevertheless it wouldn’t be very flavorful.”
Serving an viewers of 1, in a ramshackle workplace house and storage room above the Performing Storage theater, Berryman poured scorching water from a conveyable kettle over a pile of free, Chinese language black tea leaves in a small vessel. The water turned a deep amber because the leaves softened and unfurled. After a second, he poured the liquid away, refilled the vessel and served the tea in two gleaming white cups.
On the stage under, a small crew of sound and lighting technicians was making ready for a rehearsal of “Get Your Ass within the Water and Swim Like Me,” a brand new Off Broadway present starring and cocreated by Berryman, in collaboration with the Wooster Group. Between sips, he advised the story of how the present got here to be, making frequent, spirited digressions into quite a lot of topics, together with the reason for the Opium Wars, his memorable look on “Atlanta” (he performed a fictional Black Disney government accountable for “A Goofy Film”), and whether or not it’s OK to splurge on $35 maple syrup.
“You’ve obtained to reside the life that you simply wish to have sooner or later,” he mentioned.
“Get Your Ass within the Water and Swim Like Me,” primarily based on a Nineteen Seventies album of Black American folks poetry of the identical title, is a love letter to the fun and provocations of oral storytelling. It’s constructed round a sequence of “toasts,” rhyming narrative poems that have been historically recited at Black social gatherings and helped type the idea of hip-hop earlier than falling out of vogue within the late twentieth century.
The present, which started previews on Thursday, is a sibling of kinds to “The B-Facet: ‘Negro Folklore From Texas State Prisons,’” an earlier Wooster Group manufacturing — additionally starring and conceived by Berryman — that was tailored from an album of conventional African-American work songs. Like that present, “Swim Like Me” is an act of double translation, with Berryman keen his supply materials not solely from an aural medium into a visible one, however throughout distinct cultural and historic contexts.
“It’s an exquisite assembly of his youthful power and enthusiasm with this folkloric materials,” mentioned Kate Valk, a founding member of the Wooster Group and the director of each exhibits. “He’s a traditionalist and likes the act of channeling — the tracks are coming by him.”
Berryman, 35, was raised in Baltimore by his mom and drawn to acting at an early age. He grew up in an arts-loving household (his mom’s uncle, the saxophonist Gary Bartz, has been named a Jazz Grasp by the Nationwide Endowment for the Arts) and studied performing on the Baltimore College for the Arts and Carnegie Mellon College.
His exploration of African-American folks traditions started in 2013, when a summer time program with the experimental theater group SITI Firm led to his work on “Metal Hammer,” an operatic retelling of the John Henry delusion that Berryman starred in and helped develop.
It was whereas engaged on that present, and immersing himself in discipline recordings of John Henry ballads, that he found Bruce Jackson’s compilation album “Negro Folklore From Texas State Prisons.” Not lengthy after, Berryman noticed a efficiency of the Wooster Group’s “Early Shaker Spirituals,” that includes Frances McDormand and directed by Valk.
As with different Wooster exhibits, “Early Shaker Spirituals” reworked archival supply materials right into a multisensory manufacturing, utilizing an array of interpretive practices — together with vocal mimicry, re-enactment, dance choreography and sound design — to create a form of symphony of echoes.
“They have been paying homage to those atypical individuals who made priceless, unimaginable artwork,” Berryman mentioned. “I had this lightbulb second the place I believed, ‘I’d love to have the ability to try this with some work of my individuals.’”
Throughout a rehearsal for “Swim Like Me,” lower than per week earlier than previews, Valk requested Berryman to decelerate the cadence of a monologue in regards to the ordinariness of his title. He had gotten forward of a monitor recording, by which he recounts feeling insecure as an Eric rising up amongst Halimahs and Kaseems.
The present is ready at an imaginary radio station, the place a late-night host named Eric Berryman recites toasts and tells tales with the accompaniment of the drummer Jharis Yokley. Most of its one-hour run time is dedicated to the toasts, whose lewd and heroic narrators embrace Shine, the only Black survivor of the Titanic; Signifying Monkey, the trickster of the jungle; and Stagger Lee, an outlaw with an keen set off finger.
However interspersed among the many archival recordings are tapes of Berryman telling his personal story, captured by Valk as the 2 have been creating the script. Onstage, in character as Eric Berryman, the true Berryman performs this materials, too. Consistent with the Wooster approach, he’s each revealing and refracting, straddling the boundary between actuality and its illustration.
It’s becoming that, after a decade of channeling the work of his forebears, Berryman could be requested to show the approach on himself.
“How was that?” he requested Valk after working by the monologue a second time.
“Higher,” she mentioned. “A couple of extra instances and also you’ll have it.”
