Noir Town

ar warfare and anthropogenic climate cataclysm. The record is based on field recordings of Black religious services from the early-to-mid-20th century, but composed entirely of new arrangements and subtle rewrites of traditional Black folk songs, especially plummeting the depths of spirituals and original compositions by Blount.

Blount composed the music in the first months of COVID-19 and just after the murder of George Floyd. Isolated from friends and family plus recovering from a bout of long COVID, he comments, “I was consumed with fear, stricken by the concreteness of my own mortality and the collapse of everyday life. I ended up asking two questions: What will this music sound like when I’m dead? What will this music sound like when everyone is dead?”

This roots music concept album incorporating an Afrofuturist vision (based on the sci-fi writings of black lesbian Octavia Butler) occurs in the aftermath of the near annihilation of civilization with descendants of U.S. Black refugees confined to an island camp off the coast of New England.

Most of the songs are recreated lost music from memory using acoustic instruments (guitar, banjo, bass, fiddle), though there are elements of unsettling electric guitar with a harsh, high-pitched droning tone mostly for special effects, as well as looping and digital processing with percussion, layered harmonies, rap, hip-hop, gospel, and falsetto-inflected disco, including spoken moments of recitation by Blount as preacher and prophet like a musical call-and-response.

Not interested in making happy music, he instead manages to elicit anger, grief, and trauma (i.e. slavery, Jim Crow, police brutality) about what we’ve done to the planet with uplifting themes of hope and resilience, that despite a grave, uncertain future, something of us will yet survive.

Blount’s music is the personification of Black spirituality embracing humanism, queer liberation, science fiction, and religious belief. It’s clear from his work, that Blount is as much a storyteller, historian, and activist as a musician, which is why “New Faith” is both thrilling and disconcerting. It’s essential listening for anyone trying to make sense of our world dealing with racism, homo/transphobia, and environmental catastrophe. He not only updates traditional string band music, but opens new vistas and audiences for its future.t www.jakeblount.com

Read the full article, with music clips, on www.ebar.com

And there is no inherent urgency to Henry’s quest, no ticking clock to reel the narrative in. As the play opens, and recurrently throughout, Henry directly addresses the audience (a clumsy analog to noir’s narrative voiceovers). He’s a jovial, nerdy Google engineer whose father’s decades-past murder doesn’t seem to weigh heavily on him, having already made a hobby of investigating S.F.P.D. cold cases for quite some time before eventually getting around to Dad’s death.

Might Henry’s own story be a case of avoidance and repression? Neither Wong’s affable delivery or Chen’s opening monologue clue us in to such psychological underpinnings.

In fact, when Henry first explains that the victim of the murder he’s currently revisiting is his own father, opening night attendees expressed audible surprise.

What should be an ever-present emotional throughline of “The Headlands” is delivered as just one of several clever plot twists, with little lasting resonance.

The plot’s biggest wallop is a late-in-the-game reveal that, with its tale of bloodline surprises, obliquely links “The Headlands” to perhaps the greatest noir tribute film of all time: “Chinatown.” I wouldn’t put such deviltry beyond Chen’s intention, despite the flaws of “The Headlands,” its still a heady piece of work, wickedly rich in allusion as well as delusion.

by Jim Gladstone

The stars of “The Headlands,” local playwright Christopher Chen’s San Francisco mystery, now playing at A.C.T.’s Toni Rembe Theatre, are the scenic and projection design by Alexander V. Nichols.

The play’s action centers on the Sunset district house where our Chinese-American amateur private eye narrator Henry (Phil Wong) grew up. Nichols’ putty gray street-front exterior elegantly revolves on a turntable, revealing nondescript interior spaces: a kitchen, a staircase, a second floor picture window.

But every wall, inside and out, is brought to life with a shifting veil of video clips and still images, successfully evoking the shadowy, dangerous San Francisco of film noir as Henry begins delving into the fogbound facts of his father’s murder, more than twenty years earlier.

Between the motion of the set and the fluid rush of imagery, the stage becomes a dreamspace, a none-too-solid San Francisco.

While the geography of Marin plays a symbolic role in the plot, it is Henry’s headlands that the audience is drawn into. The walls between memory, speculation and the factual past dissolve. The projections are Henry’s as well.

This is gorgeous stuff: script and stagecraft in near-perfect harmony (Chen’s written stage directions deftly summarize the conceit that Nichols so handsomely executes). The first fifteen minutes dazzle.

All too soon though, Chen’s excess of exposition and director Pam Mackinnon’s languid pacing undermine the show’s conceptual brio. When the production’s initial flood of cinematic effects subsides, so does its narrative momentum.

Blues, clues

The brooding, existential aspects of the best film noir are, in part, conveyed by movies’ unique ability to fuse contemplative stillness with the relentless hurtle of time running out.

In “Dark Passage,” even as Humphrey Bogart’s character Vincent Parry stoically wrestles with inner demons amid subtle shifts of light and shadow, moviegoers remain forever conscious of a world that continues to rush forward at 24 frames per second. On stage, a frozen moment can last forever. And in “The Headlands,” it sometimes seems like they will.

In halting conversations between Henry and his girlfriend Jess (Sam Jackson, one of the Bay Area’s most charismatic actors, here a bit lost in an underwritten role) and in repeatedly remembered arguments between his parents, George (Johnny M. Wu) and Leena (Erin Mei-ling Stuart), there are pauses so long they feel anti-dramatic.

Despite its title, that classic’s Oscar-winning Robert Towne screenplay had no substantial connection to Chinese-American culture, but Chen’s script draws deeply and insightfully on it, pointing to unexpressed emotions, intergenerational dynamics and secrets kept from children by parents.

“The Headlands” may not live up to Chen’s trickiest ambitions, but it’s an impressive work of intellectual legerdemain nonetheless. Hovering over an impossible intersection of cinematic and theatrical magic, it is sometimes foggy, but always intriguing.t

‘The Headlands’ through March 5. $25-$110. A.C.T’s Toni Rembe Theater, 415 Geary St. (415) 749-2228 www.act-sf.org

Read more, including a review of Magic Theatre’s “The Travellers,” on www.ebar.com.