Arts Listings

Jovelyn Richards of Richmond, a lifelong tale-spinner with her own twist on the traditional style of African-American storytelling, is staging her brand-new narrative with music, Mrs. Pat’s House, the story of a Midwestern Depression-era madam, in an unusual East Bay performance at La Peña Cultural Center, 8 p.m., on Saturday, Nov. 15. 

“Where I grew up in Milwaukee,” Richards said, “brothels were not just the place where people went to have sex. The madam and the other ladies took care of the community around them, of the families of the women whose men didn’t have steady work in those days. It was an African-American community, mostly, but included Latinos and Asian Americans. The madam would pay the grocery store to deliver eggs and milk to families, and loved the fact they didn’t know where these were coming from, that they could make up their own stories about how the box of groceries or the coal got to be on the front porch. One woman, whose man had died, told everyone his spirit had provided.” 

Storytelling, then, isn’t just the mode Richards uses to get her perspective on the past across; it’s a theme in itself. “There’s that old tale that the very first prostitute was a storyteller!” 

Richards plays Scheherazade to her own Arabian Nights. In costume as Mrs. Pat, she moves hypnotically cross-stage to the music, taking on the different voices and mannerisms of the characters in her tale in the telling. Backed by violin, piano, lead guitar, flute and percussion, with her musicians’ voices joining hers as she intones a snatch of song, Richards remarked that a collaborator “noted I’m dancing even more in this than the last piece.” (Come Home is her tale of black soldiers returning from World War II to lynchings in rural Arkansas—but framed as a love story.) 

Her characters include “three women and a drag queen. One, Miss Lucy, leaves home when her son returns from World War I, violent and a dope fiend; she doesn’t want to watch him destroyed. The second had been passing for white, marrying a prominent upstate New York man she met in Europe; the neighbors tip him off to her background when they return together. The third woman, a Pentacostal, left the South because they thought she was a witch, making it snow in Alabama by the way she moved! The drag queen was found stabbed in a sequined dress and sheer stockings by the men who had had sex with him but couldn’t share another part of themselves. They go in and out of the story—as do the men who visit them. ‘It’s evening time and the shadows have brought you home to me’—because they come in shame. Miss Lucy has a funky blues tune that repeats, ‘I’ll be obliged.’” 

The contradictions of society are all there. None of the women has children with them, but they take care of others, “and everybody tells their children, ‘Don’t go up to that door, walk on that side of the street,’ then whisper up from the alley, ‘Is my husband in there?’ 

“The local women, with babies hanging off them, look at this beautiful house across the street with flowers, where the women sleep all day and suddenly at night come out dressed beautifully, not having to ask a husband for money. Fantasy and fear! They laugh with men freely, sit them down and offer them a drink.” 

Richards went on: “But they had a code of honor. They didn’t go after neighborhood men. They’d try to help when someone’s husband was lost in a dream, drinking and gambling. The women I knew like that understood what segregation was, how difficult it was to make a home—which was so important—and how to use their bodies, control them. Men with responsibilities would come to that house to gain back their own spirit. They were looking for something; the ladies would tell them stories. So I tell the history behind who shows up in Mrs. Pat’s house. At the core of all that is a storyteller.”  

Richards described one woman who inspired her: former jazz singer, club owner and stripper, Satin Doll. “Being in her club, getting to know her before I left the Midwest—and knowing my grandmother made her clothes ... She was connected to Richard Pryor, schooled him when he was new in the business, once got him out of a club before he was beaten up. He pays tribute to her in ‘Jo Jo Dancer,’ coming out in drag in her costume.” 

Another longtime woman in show business, Richards’ friend Mila Llauger, will be at the show, and Richards hopes she’ll sing. “I knew her in Minneapolis. She’s from Puerto Rico—and Harlem. She lived for years in San Francisco, brought up her children here, had a jazz club in Chicago. An old singer and dancer. And cook! Her dinner parties in Minneapolis had people uttering such sounds of pleasure, anybody passing outside must’ve thought they were orgies!” 

There is great—and sly—humor to Richards’ tale-spinning. Reflecting on the bordello origins of the music, she says, “Ragtime may’ve come about when all the women in a house had their cycles in line with each other—and were out of action at the same time! So the madam, I’ve heard, would order the funkiest music be played, the drinks kept coming, dancing, laughing—the customers wouldn’t even remember they didn’t have sex!” 

Humor and high spirits, with an undertow of the most serious things in life. “I want to bring the audience into the heart of a woman’s passion. But not modern-day sex like on TV. I want to slow it down, like the original strippers did, who might take an hour to get a glove off, make music in conversation, so we can actually feel. To me, we have the obligation to live—not just the breath in ourselves but the energy to engage.” 

MRS. PAT’S HOUSE 

One night only: 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 15 at La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave. $12 advance, $15 at the door. www.lapena.org. Box office hours: 1-6 p.m. Wednesday throug Friday; 1-5 p.m. Saturday.