Review: Premiere of one-man show about race compelling, honest

Posted by arts_reviews

Posted: November 8, 2007 - 9:57 am

By Maia Nolan
Daily News correspondent

There is no place in the United States where the urban-rural divide is more pronounced than it is here in Alaska. And there may be few people who have experienced the reality of that divide more fully or with more immediacy than Jack Dalton.

Jack Dalton

Dalton shares his story in the world premiere of "My Heart Runs in Two Directions at Once," a one-man show running through Wednesday at Cyrano's Off Center Playhouse.

Actually, to call Dalton's performance a one-man show is to do it a disservice. Dalton is a storyteller – a gifted one – and "My Heart Runs in Two Directions at Once" is less theater than it is an extended story told to a captive audience.

Half Yup'ik and half European, Dalton was given up for adoption by his birth mother and raised by Caucasian parents in Anchorage. The show begins with the circumstances of his birth, follows a young Dalton as he grapples with his Yup'ik identity, re-enacts the reunion with his birth family, and culminates in a series of reflections on finding his calling as a teller of stories.

While chatting in the lobby before the preview performance Wednesday night, Dalton said he was nervous about a number of things – a new venue, a new crowd, a new way of telling his story – and the nervousness showed from time to time, particularly early in the show while he was still setting up the premise.

Once Dalton hit his stride, though, he relaxed and immersed himself in his story. Expressive and engaging, Dalton draws the audience into his unique experience. Because his story is autobiographical, there is an authenticity, a credibility, that heightens the emotion. When Dalton tears up onstage, the audience knows those tears come from something real, something he truly feels.

It's moving and funny and, most importantly, honest. The performance is divided into two acts. The first deals almost exclusively with Dalton's personal history, beginning with his birth parents' chance meeting at JC Penney in 1971 and leading up to the story of how he was reunited with his biological family in Hooper Bay.

Dalton is at his best in the first act, where he teasingly but lovingly brings to life the auxiliary characters key to his story, including his parents, members of his biological family, and most entertaining, the Catholic Social Services counselor who reunited him with his birth mother. Act two, which deals with Dalton's emergence as a storyteller, has good things to say about discovering and embracing identity, but is not quite as compelling as the first half of the show, with the exception of a stirring conclusion that moved much of Wednesday night's sparse preview audience to tears.

Because Dalton is a storyteller, he engages and responds to his audience. One of the challenges he faced during the preview was the limited size of the audience; this is a performance that wants to play to a small, packed house. Cyrano's will be an excellent venue once the seats are filled. Also, since Dalton is a compelling storyteller, and since "Two Directions" is a story rather than a play, I could have done without some of the dramatic lighting effects that occasionally left Dalton quite literally in the dark. Dalton brings his story to life all on his own – no technical embellishment necessary.

Maia Nolan lives and writes in Anchorage.

Jack Dalton performs "My Heart Runs in Two Directions at Once" at 7 p.m. today through Saturday and Monday through Wednesday, with a matinee at 3 p.m. Sunday, in Cyrano's Off Center Playhouse, 413 D Street. Tickets cost $17.50. (www.centertix.net, 263-2787)

login or register to post comments