Temple U. show celebrating the ‘Shirley Temple of Hawaii’ will go on after honoree’s death

Jane Von Bergen rounds up news and notes from the theater scene in Philadelphia and the region.

Joy Valderrama Abbott, a Temple alum and benefactor, is known as the “Shirley Temple of Hawaii,” where she grew up. She had been set to appear at a Temple concert on March 14 and 15 but passed away on Feb. 8, at age 88.

In true theater tradition, the show, By George, It’s Joy, will go on at the Temple Performing Arts Center. “We will move forward, celebrating Joy’s legacy,” the school has announced.

Temple music theater students will perform songs associated with the singer and her husband, the Broadway producer, director, and playwright George Abbott (The Pajama Game, Pal Joey, and Damn Yankees).

Shows are 7:30 p.m. March 14 and 3 p.m. March 15 at TPAC. Tickets are $10-$25.

M’balia Singley admits that she wasn’t eager to see Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival’s 2013 production of Othello. But her friend, Forrest McClendon, was playing the lead, so duty and friendship called. What she saw burrowed into her brain and, seven years later, emerged as Turn, a one-woman show playing at the Kimmel Center Feb. 26-29. “It was very emotional, but not for the reasons I thought it would be,” she said.

Othello, jealous, kills his wife — amid royal intrigue, duplicity, and disloyalty. Often, Othello is played by a black actor, as William Shakespeare drew his play from an earlier tale where the character was described as a “Moor.”

In explaining her attraction to the work, Singley, of Mount Airy, leans on “intersectionality,” the theory developed by Columbia University law professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw to describe the interplay of race, gender, and class particularly experienced by black women.

“This is a play by a dead white guy usually directed by a white guy,” Singley said. “But there’s a lot more to it. If you are a black woman, you might see it in a different way.”

For example, Singley relates to Othello, understanding how it might be to be the “lonely only” black person, leading in a sea of whites. “I’ve learned how to comport myself to make others comfortable in relating to a black woman,” she said.

She relates to Othello’s wife, Desdemona, because “black women often have to deal with domestic violence as young people and adults.” Singley also sympathizes with Iago, who sets in motion the nasty intrigue after Othello gives someone else the job Iago thought he had earned. “I know what it’s like to be overlooked at work,” she said.

Something else noteworthy about Turn? The program comes with a reading list. “I’m a teacher,” Singley says, “so I’m always looking to provide more education.” One on the list is All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, a 1982 black women’s studies anthology.

Back on the Temple campus, this time at Tomlinson Theater, there’s still time to catch Alex Timbers and Michael Friedman’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, a musical based on the Shakespeare’ comedy. Four high school friends swear off romance just as they encounter eligible sweethearts. Through Feb. 28. Tickets, $10-$25.

Larry Smith had been riding the Six-Word Memoirs horse for a while before he met Sara Abou Rashed at a Six-Word Memoirs workshop he was giving for teenagers in Columbus, Ohio.

“Escaped war, war never escaped me,” she wrote, and Smith was dazzled.

“It was a lightbulb moment,” said Smith, who grew up in South Jersey, regularly visited his grandfather’s Maple Shade drugstore (Smith Brother’s Pharmacy) and attended the University of Pennsylvania. Smith had been a journalist, starting and closing a magazine before finally discovering the power of a simple idea — getting people to tell their stories in just six words.

After the workshop was over, Rashed left. Smith spent the next year or so hoping to encounter her again. When he did, the two began collaborating, and the result, A Map of Myself, is one-woman show starring Rashed and directed by Smith, playing Feb. 28 and 29 at the Interact Theatre Co. stage in the Drake.

Rashed was born and raised in Damascus, Syria. Fleeing the war, she and her family moved to Columbus, Ohio, in 2013. She’s now a junior at Denison University in Ohio.

“When she came to America at age 13, she didn’t know a word of English,” said Smith. But Rashed soon began winning poetry contests in her second language. A Map of Myself touches on immigration, war, and home. “If you leave your home voluntarily or are running for your life, it doesn’t mean you are leaving your home behind you. You carry it with you,” Smith said.

By the way, Smith is married to Piper Kerman, whose memoir — not six words — Orange Is the New Black, became the basis for the hit Netflix series.

Quintessence Theatre Group has extended Rachel, the story of a young African American woman trying to make her way in a northern city at the turn of the century. Now playing through Feb. 29.

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