Long Wharf Lives On The ​“Edge”

To a rapt audience at Space Ballroom on Thursday, Steven Sapp, of the theatre company UNIVERSES, was finishing a riveting spoken-word piece. ​“We bite the hand that feeds us,” he said, ​“because it hasn’t fed us enough.” The line resonated through the room, a breath before another onslaught of singing and rapping, harmonies and rhythms that formed the backbone of Long Wharf Theatre​’s production of Live from the Edge, running at the Hamden music club now through May 21.

As reported by the Hartford Courant in February, Live From the Edge is one of UNIVERSES’s ​“signature pieces and has been in its repertoire for decades.” As a production marking the end of UNIVERSES’s residency at Long Wharf, it’s also something of a Plan B.

UNIVERSES is a 28-year-old theater company that grew out of the Bronx arts community and has since traveled nationally and internationally. Part of its work has been to embed itself in a place or take on a topic, get to know the people involved, and create theater pieces from interviews and impressions. It has created a piece about New Orleans after Katrina as well as a piece about the Black Panther Party called Party People.

UNIVERSES became acquainted with New Haven in the late 1990s, first when the company was invited to perform at the International Festival of Arts and Ideas. The company’s members then returned to interview former members of the New Haven chapter of the Panthers for Party People. ​“Even then, our Black and Puerto Rican roots invited us to continue building our relationship with this complicatedly vibrant city,” write Mildred Ruiz-Sapp and Steven Sapp in the program notes for Live from the Edge.

The initial idea for the Long Wharf residency, which began in 2020, was to create a new theater piece inspired by New Haven. ​“Basically we thought we’d be living in New Haven, being part of the community and writing a play,” UNIVERSES co-founder Steven Sapp said to the Courant in February. ​“But it got flipped.” Sapp here is referring to the twin disruptions of the pandemic and Long Wharf losing its Sargent Drive space and pursuing instead an itinerant theater model that now promises to bring theater to spaces throughout the New Haven area. This meant that UNIVERSES didn’t end up living in New Haven at all; for their residency, they participated virtually in some of Long Wharf’s pandemic programming and visited Space Ballroom just to make sure the stage was suitable for their piece.

Thus, while Live from the Edge has been billed as Long Wharf’s first full production since adopting its new approach, it’s more of a holdover from a previous time, and in a strange way, ineffably, the shadow of what could have been hangs, sometimes unfairly and sometimes beneficially, over what is.

It’s certainly not a problem of the piece itself. From the first second, the performers — Asia Mark, Nate John Mark, Nsangou Njikam, Sophia Ramos (who was not in attendance when this reporter saw the show) Mildred Ruiz-Sapp, and Steven Sapp — command the stage. UNIVERSES’s style is a seamless, energetic blend of a pretty astonishing range of influences, the DNA of which are present in every moment. The company’s members bill themselves as fusing ​“theater, poetry, dance, jazz, hip hop, politics, down home blues and Spanish boleros,” but the list could be even longer.

“Our company grew out of the open mic scene in New York,” Sapp said in the Courant, and Live from the Edge is ​“like our greatest hits package. It’s like a band playing a set.” Sapp is right. The performance is essentially musical, interspersed with a few spoken-word pieces. The company members have no instruments, creating rhythmic and harmonic lines with their voices and by stomping their feet and clapping their hands. The sound they make is quite contemporary as it also reaches far back into the past, to old spirituals and work songs. Those forms of music are testaments to innovation in the face of extreme desperation; it’s music made by people who have only their bodies to offer to their art, and they give it all.

The UNIVERSES company uses that lineage to great effect. Sapp mentioned from the stage that the specific pieces in the show may well change from night to night, so your reporter hesitates to comment too much on any particular moments. But in its talent, its scrappiness, its humor, and its big heart, Live from the Edge offers a document of the history of the company and, more broadly, how it found its voice. There are ruminations on family, on love and trauma. There are confrontations with and interrogations of politics, past and present. And there are documents of the sometimes risky path the company has taken as artists, with trips to post-Katrina New Orleans and the maximum-security Sing Sing Correctional Facility making the deepest impressions. By the end, a portrait has emerged of UNIVERSES as artists who thrive on putting as much of themselves into their art as they can. That shows in the openness and honesty of the material and in the sweats the company members break in performing it.

Though this couldn’t have been planned back in 2020, this all makes Live from the Edge a near-ideal first show for Long Wharf to put on in a more unconventional place for theater like Space Ballroom. The pairing of company with venue works quite well, possibly better than it would have worked on either of Long Wharf’s Sargent Drive stages, and if part of Long Wharf’s programming in the future involves more productions like it, it would mark a pretty thrilling diversification of theater options in the greater New Haven area, and perhaps a model for others of what a flexible, innovative regional theater company can do.

But the rocky path of UNIVERSES’s residency shows on the edges as well. This reporter kept himself intentionally somewhat in the dark regarding the details about the residency I’ve now written about above, wanting to experience Live from the Edge as freshly as possible. Even during that naive viewing, as the company mentioned that it had been in virtual residency during the pandemic — and then mentioned how it had made an entire theater piece about New Orleans shortly after Katrina — I wondered to myself why Long Wharf hadn’t used the residency to make a similar piece about Covid-19, something that a company like UNIVERSES would have excelled at, and which I would have liked to see. Knowing what I know now, as a person endlessly fascinated by where we live, I mourn the loss of a sustained performance piece from UNIVERSES about the Elm City, too.

And while Live from the Edge, taken as it is, is a vibrant success, it’s not convincing as a proof of concept for the grander ambitions Long Wharf has laid out for itself. In its program for Live from the Edge, Long Wharf announces that it is ​“strengthening its roots of deeply investing in new work for the American stage. With 12 projects in development, upcoming seasons will bring premiere plays and musicals from this roster of diverse, national artists.” Space Ballroom is a great music club, but it’s not a place where a truly full production of a contemporary play or musical — as Long Wharf audiences have come to expect, after nearly 60 years — can happen. The question of whether Long Wharf in its new itinerant form can pull off theater of the technical caliber it routinely attained in the past has yet to be answered. For now, Long Wharf is living on the edge.

Long Wharf Theatre’s production of Live from the Edge runs at Space Ballroom, 295 Treadwell St., Hamden, through May 21, with official opening night on Apr. 29. Visit Long Wharf Theatre’s website for tickets and more information.