Sitting with college friends in a dorm room around 1970, we found vicarious danger and a smattering of imagined relevance listening to Gil Scott-Heron's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." Today, of course, you can watch revolutions in real-time video between the tweets.
In Party People at Berkeley Rep, a young activist tries to spark greying veterans of the Black Panthers and the Young Lords with the suggestion that a rekindled revolution can now have its own website. He is laughed at, but not long after, one of the elders talks about the benign community programs these groups provided amid their more militant activities. "Google it," this social-war veteran challenges the audience, therein invoking, with inadvertent irony, the services of a corporate colossus. Everything from cats that flush toilets to extremist brutality in faraway countries can be commodified these days.
These confused realities are a central part of Party People, a musical play that imagines a reunion of surviving Black Panthers and the Latino-based Young Lords, whose memories of their glory days are variously rueful, proud, sad, and vengeful – and very often in conflict with each other. To further twist the situation, these guests find that they are players in a performance piece that the well-intentioned, if insensitively ambitious, young organizers are recording. It's just one more commodification of movements that once seemed so untainted by the big bad system.
The performance ensemble known as Universes created Party People both from research and from interviews with many of the survivors of those turbulent earlier times. While many familiar names are invoked, including Bobby Seale, Fred Hampton, Eldridge Cleaver, and Huey P. Newton, the characters on stage are either amalgams or fictional. With 12 performers playing even more characters, it isn't always possible to clearly grasp their histories or their relationships to one another. And yet both as individuals and as an ensemble, this cast creates a mighty roar through song, dance, rap, and traditional dialogue.
Universes is made up of Steven Sapp, Mildred Ruiz-Sapp, and William Ruiz, and they are also part of the cast. Liesl Tommy, who first directed Party People at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, creates a controlled kaleidoscope on Marcus Doshi's loft-like set rigged out with video screens and capped with a huge amusement park-like sign spelling out "Revolution!" that is part of the organizers' misconceived notion of what this party should look like.
The guests of honor, many of them reluctant participants, are both in the past and the present as they recreate moments from more than 40 years ago, try to communicate the passions that once motivated them, and play out anew simmering feuds left over from early days. There are acknowledgements of movement missteps, including a bitter soliloquy by the widow of a white cop caught up in the crossfire, and the paranoia fueled by an obsessive FBI's efforts at infiltration and misinformation. The volatile moods can take the form of a stylized ballet with rifles in Millicent Johnnie's choreography, a fiercely angry song about prison life, communal production numbers with a kind of Hair-like feel, and a particularly effective aria-rant by Steven Sapp as one of the grizzled veterans of the movement.
We are guests of this party perhaps longer than we might like, but then again, the onstage guests are not at some tidy social. They are overflowing with emotion, all part of an epoch that was as fiery as it was brief. Those emotions turn out to be contagious, and we all leave the party a little shaken and a little wiser.
Party People will run at Berkeley Rep through Nov. 16. Tickets are $29-$89. Call (510) 647-2949 or go to berkeleyrep.org.