"Big River' at the Arts Bank

Earlier this year, the Philadelphia Theatre Company presented The Scottsboro Boys, an unlikely but successful minstrel show about black adolescents who were falsely charged with rape in Alabama during the Jim Crow era.

This month the University of the Arts took us back to slavery with the musical Big River, adapted from Mark Twain's 1885 novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. That classic was published 22 years after the Emancipation Proclamation and a decade after the Civil Rights Act of 1875. So its story— about a youth who runs away from home, incidentally helping the slave Jim escape to freedom aboard a raft down the Mississippi— should have been outdated at birth.

Alas, Mark Twain was all too prescient about racism in the U.S. The 1880s witnessed the birth of Jim Crow, a system of racial disenfranchisement, separate-but-equal laws and segregation that in some respects was harsher than slavery.

Americans are still paying the price for that denial of freedom, which is (as Huck remarks about a pair of swindlers) "enough to make a body ashamed of the human race."

And it's enough for Big River, which reached Broadway in 1985 with a revival in 2003 (winning Tonys both times), to remain potent.

Big River's music is country, bluegrass and gospel. The UArts presented the show in concert form, with an onstage band and a row of music stands and microphones for the singers and their books, but there was also a lot of staging for the cast of 30, including the chorus. The troupe included both students and faculty of UArts' Ira Brind School of Theater Arts.

"'I owns myself'

The special attraction was Forrest McClendon, a UArts teacher who had appeared in Philadelphia Theatre Company's Scottsboro Boys and won a Tony nomination for his performance in the play's Broadway run.

As straight-backed and self-important as he was in that play (in the roles of the deputy sheriff and the northern lawyer Samuel Liebowitz), as the beaten-down slave Jim in Big River, McClendon slumped his broad shoulders and moved heavily.

But Jim is no defeated human being. He happens to learn what he's worth at auction, and as he and Huck make their joint bolt for freedom, he tells Huck with a smile of pride, "I got mo' money than ever I did. I owns myself, and I'm worth $800."

In fact, Jim is the only American in the play with a sense of family values. He seeks his freedom so that he can free his wife— a slave in another white household— and both can earn enough money to free their two children, indentured to someone else.

Meanwhile, Huck's moral code is turned inside out. Despite being Jim's life support, he fears being a "dirty abolitionist." He confuses himself with the religious and legal idea that if he helps Jim take back his children, Jim will be stealing— and Huck, for abetting the theft of personal property, will go to hell, if not jail as well.

When Huck finally settles this perplexity, his moral education is complete and he finally understands his responsibility to Jim.

Teacher's touch

McClendon filled the auditorium with his voice; and his commanding presence— especially the intense penetration of his eyes—no doubt raised the students' level of performance, especially that of Adam Hoyak, who played Huck.

Hoyak, a junior, was convincing as a wide-eyed truant learning about the world, but he must have felt pulled out of his shoes going head-to-head with McClendon in their duets.

Indeed, most of the chorus displayed a comparable talent and energy, especially Tanika Roberts (Alice), a senior, and Khadijah Rolle (Betsy), a junior. And— feat of feats— every word was intelligible.

The production's energy rolled right out to the audience, which consisted mostly of students. They cheered at the dimming of the lights, clapped in rhythm at the overture's hoedown music, laughed like my young grandchildren at Pap Finn's "cussin'," and unleashed waves of excitement that must have teased even better performances from the cast.