Once you drive over Durango Bridge and cross Hackberry Street, you know you are in the East Side of San Antonio. Hackberry is one of the oldest and longest streets in San Antonio, and perhaps, some would say, one of the most dangerous. Crack deals are made like the easy jangle that sounds when change hits together in a jiving man’s pocket on the street corners of this wayward walking-woman’s road.
And it is exactly this poverty-stricken environment that provides the fodder for St. Philip’s Professor Vincent Hardy’s play, A Place to Stand.
The performance was, hands down, phenomenal.
The play, which included acting, dancing, and vocal performances by students, professors, and employees of St. Philip’s, had a simple but engaging stage. Stage-left was a basketball net with a bench close to the court. Stage-right was a slate-grey, multi-level brick wall. Back of Stage-front, behind a gossamer veil, was a quartet — consisting of guitar, keyboard, bass, and drums. The musicians were set up like those in the symphony in Disney’s Fantasia, each instrument outlined and emphasized by shadows upon a blue backdrop; but the themes and social commentary of the play were anything but phantasmal.
Watching the play was, absolutely, a profoundly heart-wrenching experience.
The performance begins with a young girl, Angelie Parham, lying in her gown on a hospital bed. Her mother, Mrs. Patrice Parham, lays a loving hand upon her daughter and proclaims with great sadness and regret that her daughter is a bad girl, now. In rushes the mother’s eldest son, Nathan Parham, in vibrant red shirt and hat, and sharp sneakers. The mother immediately becomes angry and exclaims that this is his fault. She then takes a pop-gun from her purse, aims it at her son, and yells at him to leave. The younger son, Caliph, rushes in, asking his mother what she is doing. The un-welcomed son leaves as the mother lowers the piece, portraying a sense of utter defeat and exhaustion.
In simple form, the storyline presents youth and families caught in the tragedy of poverty. Of high school age, the youth are presented two avenues: one in which they go to school and work and live the “straight” but struggling life and the other in which they deal drugs on the street, where fast money and reputation are sought over education and hope.
Nathan is caught between the two lives. He cares deeply for his family and has the opportunity to live right, but a prior drug conviction depleted his mother’s savings. Nathan escaped prison for probation, but feels he must repay the thousands of dollars his mother spent to save his life. In Nathan’s misguided perspective, he must go back to selling drugs to repay his mother, even though she has offered to provide him safe haven from the streets.
Pulling from the classical Shakespearean theme of star-crossed lovers, Hardy’s character Angelie is a straight A student who falls in love with Nathan’s drug-selling partner, Heaven.
Angelie sees the good in Heaven when no else does. But Heaven is too deep in the life to change. When Angelie becomes pregnant and exclaims naively and excitedly that she is going to have his child, Heaven brutalizes her. She loses the child and Heaven is, later that night, shot by police in an unrelated incident.
The power of this piece resides in the naked humility of truth, of one young woman finding worth in the heart of a young man who harms. Even when Angelie awakes in the hospital and discovers her two loses, she laments for the soul of Heaven. She berates human kind for allowing such violence to persist. In a poignant monologue, Angelie points out that mankind has existed for some four million years. How, she asks, can we not have evolved from such violence against one another in that time?
