Eric Berryman shares African American toasts in Wooster Group’s Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me (photo by Marika Kent)
GET YOUR ASS IN THE WATER AND SWIM LIKE ME
The Wooster Group
The Performing Garage
33 Wooster St. between Grand & Broome Sts.
Tuesday – Saturday through February 3, $39-$79
thewoostergroup.org
In 2019, the Wooster Group production of The B-Side: “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons,” a Record Album Interpretation earned a Drama Desk nomination for Unique Theatrical Experience for Eric Berryman’s multimedia adaptation of a 1965 LP compiled by Bruce Jackson, consisting of performances by inmates of color on segregated agricultural prison farms.
Writer and actor Berryman and director Kate Valk are now back with their follow-up, Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me, continuing at the Performing Garage through February 3. This time Berryman dives deep into Jackson’s 1974 book and 1976 disc, Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition, a collection of folktales known as toasts, made for heroes and antiheroes in the Black storytelling canon.
The set, by Wooster Group founding member and director Elizabeth LeCompte, evokes a radio DJ studio, where Berryman sits at a long table with a laptop and various electronic instruments; to his right is a microphone, behind him a monitor, and to his left a standing table with a smaller monitor. He is joined onstage by drummer Jharis Yokley, who adds percussion throughout, from pounding solos to gentle brushstrokes. As Berryman recites the toasts — some of which have been recorded by Rudy Ray Moore and George Clinton — he occasionally projects video and photographs on the monitor, from a car chase to archival footage to live shots of himself.
Berryman kicks things off with “Titanic,” which honors Shine, a Black man on the Titanic who kept “warning the captain and the white people that the ship is going down. They don’t believe him. So he says, ‘Fuck y’all, I’m out.’ He jumps overboard and starts swimming to shore. The white people on the deck start yelling, ‘Please come back and help us!’ And in one version of the toast, as he’s swimming away, Shine says, ‘Get your ass in the water and swim like me.’” Berryman’s retelling is fast-paced and rhythmic, with rap and hip-hop inflections that go well beyond mere recitation.
In “Signifying Monkey,” a forest primate battles a lion and an elephant. “Partytime Monkey” takes place at a party on Juneteenth, but the unhappy title mammal is incensed that he was not invited. In “Joe the Grinder and G.I. Joe,” a man returns from WWII to find his wife has been unfaithful. “’Flicted Arm Pete” is about a fornication contest that gets out of hand.
Drummer Jharis Yokley and actor Eric Berryman share a personal moment in Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me (photo by Marika Kent)
The tales are filled with tawdry sex and extreme violence — bullets are flying everywhere — but as funny as they are, there’s also an underlying sense of discomfort, particularly with a primarily white audience, as the stories contain stereotypes reminiscent of minstrelsy. Berryman compares these over-the-top characters to Greek myths, where such figures as Hercules and Jason “would do stupid shit because they knew it would help them uh, uh, more quickly achieve kleos, and get kleos . . . A community creates the heroes that they need.”
Berryman (Primary Trust, Toni Stone) is not just sharing old fables but exploring Black identity then and now. At one point he digresses into a discussion of his own name, how disappointed he is to be anchored with the plain “Eric” when he has relatives called Qasim, Idris, Indira, Akeem, Alenka, and Adia. (He does note that there is a Gary but does not share that it’s his uncle, Grammy-winning jazz saxophonist Gary Bartz.)
In addition to the eight toasts, each evening includes an improvised Q&A between Berryman and Yokley; the night I went, Berryman asked the charming drummer, producer, and songwriter about his favorite grade from K through 12 and what he is afraid of, again incorporating ideas of personal identity into the play and creating a further bond between the performers and the audience, some of whom sit in chairs on the stage.
The show concludes with the all-time favorite “Stackolee,” a tale of murder and mayhem that has been recorded in different versions by Mississippi John Hurt, Doc Watson, Wilbert Harrison, Long Cleve Reed, Lloyd Price, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, among others, its familiarity spotlighting the centrality rather than the marginalization of the Black experience in American popular culture.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]