A show about the stories Black men tell in dusky rooms has been lovingly revived in a dusky room

 

Summer visits to Mississippi were a minefield. If you weren’t careful, you could get stung by a jellyfish hiding under the sand at the beach. If you went into the backyard at night, you could get bit by an o-possum. If you opened the wrong door in my uncle’s house, you might find his jar of ears. 

 

My uncle has since passed away and I cannot validate or refute the “Ear Jar”. On this side of the great beyond, he was a husband, a brother, and a war veteran. He drank bottled beer and smoked cigarettes (which my parents never did) and sometimes he would do both of those things while he told off-color stories (which my parents did not want me to hear). They would send me away to play with my cousins and I would venture through the house with my eyes half-closed, worried that I’d turn the wrong knob, open the wrong door, and end up in the War Room, face-to-face with a pickle jar devoid of pickles.

 

★ See my video review on TikTok ★

 

I thought of my uncle the first time I saw Get Your Ass In the Water and Swim Like Me in January 2023 and again during my second time this Sunday. The show tucks Black oratorical history into the folds of a fictional radio program. Eric Berryman, who just wrapped up his month-long performance as a lionhearted Ethiopian warrior in Memnon, delivers a series of toasts in between interludes where he plays himself as an NPR-style radio host. As the host, he gives an epigrammatic explanation of the tension between the men who were drafted and the men who kept their beds warm back home during the war. Then, he performs the toast “Joe The Grinder and G.I. Joe” which is like if Mommy got caught kissing Santa Claus, was promptly thrown out into the snow, and replaced by a new lady — with cuss words and threats. 

 

 

 

It wasn’t until my second watch that I could fully appreciate the range of voices and personas Mr. Berryman uses to bring the toasts to life. His voice is a cartoonish scamper during “Partytime Monkey” while “Pimpin’ Sam” draws out snappy, razor-sharp wit for Sam and gravelly sensuality for Nell, the prostitute riding in Sam’s car. The toasts are set to percussion by drummer Jharis Yokley who mostly speaks through his drum kit save for a short comical interlude about which animal he’d like to be able to talk to. Both the lines and the beats speed by, these are not the measured toasts you’d hear at a wedding reception or the drawn-out prayers of an altar call, and at this pace it’s forgivable when Mr. Berryman misses a word or two. If you’ve ever tried to rap your favorite track at karaoke, you understand the difficulty of the task at hand.

 

 

These toasts (aptly referred to as “bawdy poetry” on the Joe’s Pub website) are rhyming stories. Heroic ballads. Nursery rhymes about sex, trickery, murder, self-defense, power, and persona. They were written down and recorded in 1976 by historian Bruce Jackson, funded with a grant from Harvard. Outside of academic circles, Rudy Ray Moore jumpstarted his stand-up career by performing as Dolemite, a character from the stories he heard homeless older men telling on street corners. (Moore also recorded the toasts, sans-grant.) In the original 1975 film Dolemite, Moore performs toasts in a parking lot to neighborhood admirers. In the 2019 biopic Dolemite Is My Name, Eddie Murphy impersonates Moore’s cult-classic spoken word down to the syllable. Berryman’s performance in Get Your Ass.. is part of a longer lineage of remembering and forgetting and remembering and performing these ballads.

 

Moore recorded the first ‘Dolemite’ comedy album Below The Belt in his own living room and the sounds of guests smoking, drinking, and laughing are just as much a part of the track as Moore’s performance. Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater, with its wood-paneled booths and flickering candles, is better suited to the production than its former venue, the Performing Garage. It makes sense to watch this show with a strong, brown drink in hand since these kinds of stories have grown out of living rooms and pool halls and VFWs.

 

★ See my video review on TikTok ★

 

But there’s still something missing (and I’m not talking about the cigarette smoke, which has been banned indoors in NYC since 2002). I imagine my uncle sitting beside me in the booth, with an ice cold bottle of beer in hand, wheezing with laughter at every punchline. He’d get it and he might have even been able to rap along if he wasn’t lying beneath a marble headstone in Biloxi. The Sunday night crowd at Joe’s Pub was pensive bordering on prudish. They seemed afraid to laugh when the jokes were off-color and unsure of when to applaud — these are not my uncle’s people. The joke about animals having a party to celebrate their freedom on June 19 was lost on them, even with an emphatic pause and an exaggerated stare through the fourth wall. While this dusky setting is a step in the right direction, the best venue for Mr. Berryman’s vision will be one where the audience will loosen up, have a drink, and join him in making a toast to our history.          

 

blacklove 🖤 and starlight 🌟 

 

The 2025 production of The Wooster Group/Eric Berryman: Get Your Ass In the Water and Swim Like Me opened at Joe’s Pub on August 13 and will run through August 23, 2025. The show features Eric Berryman and Jharis Yokley, was created by Eric Berryman and The Wooster Group, and is directed by Kate Valk. The performance is based on the LP Get Your Ass In the Water and Swim Like Me: Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition which was recorded and edited by Bruce Jackson. Tickets for the show start at $30 and the venue requires a 2-drink minimum. I was invited to attend this show by The Wooster Group and Eric Berryman and extend my thanks. 

 

Read or watch my review of the 2024 production. Fun fact: it was the first show I ever Black Star Review-ed. 🖤