Exhilarating ‘Trans-Atlantic Time Traveling Company’ at Theater Alliance shifts arc of the universe toward healing

In the 1960s, Oscar Brown Jr. in an ode to his favorite waitress reminded his audience that “Hazels’s hips bring the tips.” In the 1990s Sir Mix-a-Lot noted: “I like big butts and I cannot lie.”

Indeed, Black women with big booties always attract our attention. We often turn these women into objects for our adoration, envy, emulation, and/or curiosity. They also are often seen as objects of ridicule and torture under the guise of pseudoscientific research. The torture and mistreatment of Sarah Baartman, called by her promoters “The Hottentot Venus,” is probably the most famous. The Trans-Atlantic Time Traveling Company is a devised work of dance theater that in its narrative reverses the trajectory of such “scientific” research.

Creator and playwright Holly Bass presents us with three transcendently (and absurdly) large-bottomed Black women (costumed by Cidney Forkpah) who are traveling through the heart of the darkness that is the United States of America’s South in the 1860s as performers in a medicine show. These are freedwomen from the future and from different dimensions, where a disease that started millennia before their birth is now threatening to wipe out all of humankind. These women have traveled here to, in the words of their leader, “find the original strain of the sickness. Formulate an antidote. And eradicate it.” To that end, they give away their healing potions (comforting and mildly flavored white salt water taffy) to their audiences (who are us). When they collect the discarded containers of the potions, the women gather more information about how the disease operates and how their hypotheses and treatments are working so far.

The show is entertaining and, by turns, comforting and thought-provoking. With its premise of performing outdoors by a campfire, the show is kind of like a displaced Prairie Home Companion. It is performed by a trio of compelling and reassuringly engaging actors (Sisi Reid as Margaret, Cynthia Davis as Ruth, Amani Alexander as Jemma/Judea) who take the show’s proposition by the horns and never let go.  Under their leadership, this Time Traveling show is an exhilarating ride. And the actors make sure the joke is never on the competent Black women that they are embodying at the center of the story — who after all are aerospace engineers as well as spiritual mediums. Instead, they make clear that this “joke” — this lethal mysterious illness that they take seriously — is on all of us if we continue to refuse to evolve in the ways the new millennia demand.

The set is dominated by an iconic Conestoga wagon (Gisella Estrada, scenic design) of the type that European folks used to travel across and occupy the United States. The wagon is rotated from time to time as the women change the direction of their journey. (This wagon, driven and maintained by women, is also evocative of the wagon that Brecht’s Mother Courage commandeered as she tried to survive wars on the European continent.) Lighting Designer Michelle Onwochei, Sound Designer Madeline Oslejsek, Projections Designer Jeremy Bennett, and Properties Designer Amy Kellett all combine their skills to place our performers firmly in a 19th-century America permeated by eerie sound and light intrusions from different realms of existence.

Music, especially as embodied in musical forms that evolved through an African diasporic consciousness, plays a large part in how this trio of travelers survives, communicates, and travels across time and dimensions. When our Black space and time travelers sang the recognizable “Negro spiritual” the audience readily accepted it as an appropriate medium for cross-dimensional and cross-time communication. On the other hand, when those same time-traveling women channeled Phil Collins’s “Don’t You Lose My Number,” the audience giggled and guffawed. Yet this song is also a raveled segment of the thread of Black American music. It’s a “red thread” connecting a people across millennia and dimensions both forward and backward in time. This is a form of communication at its most psychic and visceral. And it is this form of time travel, in search of a cure for a dangerous disease that threatens to destroy future generations, that the members of The Trans-Atlantic Time Traveling Company trade in.

The illness that the Time Traveling Company is trying to eliminate is not a secret. We’ve seen it portrayed before in Melville’s Moby Dick, as Captain Ahab’s pursuit of whiteness becomes so great that it leads to destruction of the ship of state and all who are aboard it. Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis series, N. K. Jemisin, Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, and the current terminologies of Afro-Futurism are all swimming in similar waters.

As members of the Time Traveling Company continue their progress of performances throughout the United States, they begin to give voice to some realizations they are making:

“I’ve been speaking to myself: in the future and the past.”
“We are the darkness.”
“We are operating under the shadows of the sickness.”
“Slavery is the commonality of all the people we are born under.”

The journey The Trans-Atlantic Time Traveling Company seeks to take us on is one that engages us in a conversation about what it means to be free and ways we can move toward an equitable and just society.

The audience gathered in the theater shares fates with the characters in the play. The performers invite the audience to wrestle out loud with questions that their dilemma brings up. Such as:

Who was afraid of the dark as a child?
Who is still afraid of the dark?
What did you think would happen in the dark?
Does anything good ever come from the dark?

The world is in an indecisive moment right now. Perhaps in recognition of that global and national ambivalence, The Trans-Atlantic Time Traveling Company leaves us with at least one possibly useful and concrete tool. Everyone who attends the performance receives as they leave the theater “Universal Freedom papers that work in every jurisdiction no matter the year or the dimension.” The Freedom papers declare in part:

“The holder of the document is a Citizen of the Universe, and is entitled to be respected accordingly, in person and property, at all times, by sea and land, in the due prosecution of their lawful concerns.”

Running Time: 90 minutes without intermission

The Trans-Atlantic Time Traveling Company (2024) plays through March 17, 2024, presented by Theater Alliance performing at Anacostia Playhouse, 2020 Shannon Place SE, Washington, DC. Tickets ($25–$40) are available at the box office prior to showtime or online. Theater Alliance offers discounts for active and retired military service people, senior citizens, students as well as East of the River neighbors and industry professionals. Under its Radical Neighboring program Theater Alliance reserves 10 tickets to every performance (excluding Opening Nights) for Name Your Own Price ticketing: one per person.

The program for The Trans-Atlantic Time Traveling Company is online here.

The Transatlantic Time Traveling Company
By Holly Bass

CAST
Jemma: Amani Alexander
Ruth: Cynthia Davis
Margaret: Sisi Reid

ARTISTIC TEAM
Directed by Ezinne Elele
Choreographed by Jasmine Hearn
Associate Directed & Choreographed by Holly Bass
First presented in workshop by Theater Alliance in 2018

Scenic Design: Gisela Estrada
Sound Design: Madeline Oslejsek
Lighting Designer: Michele Onwochei
Costume Designer: Cidney Forkpah
Props Design: Amy Kellett
Projection Designer: Jeremy Bennett
Dramaturg: Otis Ramsey-Zöe
Stage Manager: Alyssa Hill
Assistant Stage Manager: Christina McCann
Production Manager: Dominique Douglas Hendricks

SEE ALSO:
A Report on ‘The Trans-Atlantic Time Traveling Company’ (report on the 2018 workshop by John Stoltenberg, July 29, 2018)
Holly Bass Celebrates Black Sisterhood in ‘The Trans-Atlantic Time Traveling Company’ (interview by Lisa Traiger, July 25, 2018