When in Feeding the Dragon Sharon Washington describes herself as “the little girl who lived in the library,” she announces in one phrase the enchantment that was a feature of her childhood.
Walking onto Tony Ferrieri’s set with its broad three-step staircase the risers of which are book-lined, the lean, athletic-looking Washington reports that from 1969 to 1973 she lived with her father and mother in the top-floor apartment of the St. Agnes branch of the New York Public Library at 444-446 Amsterdam Avenue.
She adds that to the delight of any child who loves to read, she devoured everything she could put her hands on. When she was still preadolescent, she even took a copy of Dr. David Reuben’s best-selling Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask to share with school chums. Amusingly precocious, no?
But it’s not the books on which she wants to linger as she strides purposefully about in the pants-suit outfit Toni-Leslie James chose for her. Yes, along the way she reads, perhaps not surprisingly, from W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and James Baldwin, but the reading, with its built-in and catalogued enchantment, was always inextricably entangled with the weighty reality of everyday life.
Washington—who was educated as a youngster at the prestigious East Side Dalton School and has gone on to have an impressive acting career (The Scottsboro Boys off and on Broadway among her many credits)—is compelled to talk as candidly as she knows how about the complicated life she led with her parents.
Her father, born in the South, maintained the library and thereby afforded them the free accommodations up those circular stone steps. Her mother, born in the City—and, as Washington says, a true “Noo Yawker”—was a housewife whose primary duties were raising her daughter and attempting to keep her increasingly alcoholic husband off the sauce.
The latter task proved difficult, as Washington’s father, who frequently talked about not minding hard work, grew to resent the constant marble cleaning and brass-rails polishing required. Possibly, the chore he disliked most was stoking the furnace in the library basement, a job particularly crucial on library days before the doors were opened.
This is where Washington gets the title of the 90-minute chat Primary Stages brings to Manhattan after Pittsburgh and Hartford stops. She says that the furnace, as constructed, resembled a dragon. Feeding it shovelfuls of coal, which on one occasion her mother and she had to do in her father’s inebriated indisposition, slowly becomes symbolic for her of the demands heaped on the family’s existence.
As Washington climbs up and down the stairs in front of a stage-wide paneled grid that lighting designer Ann G. Wrightson keeps shifting colors according to mood (mounting reds when the furnace to stoked), she recalls good times and bad.
She talks about a collection of Sunday-best clothes with sales tags her mother never gets to wear. She recalls listening to Billie Holiday and The Ink Spots. She remembers a three-week trip South to visit Uncle Gene and Aunt Sis when her mother decided the drinking up North was too much for a child to endure. She gabs about the neighboring buildings and the neighbors she got to know and like.
In the 1965 Manchild in the Promised Land—perhaps a book Washington read at one of the library tables she happily occupied—the author Claude Brown celebrates the quality of magic that just about everyone’s childhood surroundings take on no matter how rich or poor they are. For her part Washington sees and lives the magic but also stresses the harsh grounding all but the luckiest children inevitably encounter. Moving confidently about the stage and sometimes even dancing under Maria Mileaf’s capable direction, she’s a welcome guide to the recognizable duality.
Feeding the Dragon opened April 3, 2018, at the Cherry Lane Theatre and runs through April 27. Tickets and information: primarystages.org
