Long Wharf Theatre Finds Its "Edge"

Mildred Ruiz-Sapp in Live From The Edge. The show runs at the Space Ballroom, 295 Treadwell St. in Hamden, Thursdays through Sundays through May 21. T. Charles Erickson Photos.

“Let me clear my throat!” Mildred Ruiz-Sapp’s voice rang from the mic, and immediately the room was at attention. Breath stilled as verse spilled over the stage and reached toward the rafters. In the audience, a few heads bobbed instinctively to the sound. Nate John Mark leaned into the mic, and spit out an album scratch. Around him, voices came in one by one, until it was a symphony soaked in the South Bronx.

Welcome to Universes’ Live From The Edge, the first production from Long Wharf Theatre since its move out of 222 Sargent Dr. last year. From the show’s first lighting cue to its sharp writing, propulsive vocals and eye toward participation, it is a thrilling testament to storytelling that pays homage to spoken word, oral tradition, generations of poets and musicians and the breadth of a diaspora. In the process, it presents a living model of what the theater hopes to be as it moves fully into itinerancy. 

Live From The Edge runs Thursdays through Sundays through May 21 at the Space Ballroom, located at 295 Treadwell St. in Hamden. The show features Universes Founders Sapp and Ruiz-Sapp, as well as Asia Mark, Nate John Mark, NSangou Njikam and for some of the run, Sophia Ramos. Tickets and more information are available here. 

From the moment the work begins with a full-lunged cry, there’s something about Live From The Edge that is elemental and organic, fully birthed but also still being born. In the absence of a set, cast members line up in a row, accompanied by only their music stands and voices bigger than their bodies. Overhead, lights shift from orange to red to purple to green and back again, bathing the ensemble in color. 

There’s an intimacy there: the Space Ballroom is a bar and music venue, and it feels more like Cafe Nine or the Nuyorican Poets Cafe or even a more lax Joe’s Pub than the Claire Tow Stage. Inside, there’s not a bad seat in the house: even attendees in the back rows can see each skyward-fluttering arm, each bead of sweat, each spray of spittle and wide-eyed interjection if they are paying attention. And if they're not, they should be. 

NSangou Njikam, Mildred Ruiz-Sapp and Asia May Mark in Live From The Edge. The show runs at the Space Ballroom, 295 Treadwell St. in Hamden, Thursdays through Sundays through May 21. T. Charles Erickson Photos.

It works for the ensemble, members of which move at a pace that doesn’t break or drag for 90 minutes. To cheers from the audience, Sapp recites and remixes the ABCs, flowing from an homage to hip-hop to a tour through the South Bronx to a reminder that government benefits have never been about lifting people out of poverty. Asia Mark steps back from the mic, and is suddenly singing on a subway platform deep in Brooklyn, her voice rising to meet the belch and squeal of the train as it rolls into the station. 

They’re just getting started. With stomping feet and resonant, ringing clapping, the group holds hundreds of years of history, telling a story of America that isn’t taught in civics classes or historically white arts institutions. At one point, it is in their “I’m On My Way (To Canaan Land),” with a lush, layered harmony that a listener can feel to their bones. At another, Ruiz-Sapp opens her mouth, and a songbird flies right out in brilliant color, channeling a history of gospel and boleros that were her education long before she ever got to Bard College.

Along the way, there are nods to the bendability of language, to centuries-old spirituals and nineties dancehall, to the ungentle but loved cacophony of New York City and the magic of Clive Campbell in a Bronx rec room 50 years ago this August. It’s a history lesson and a call towards liberation, yes, but told with so much warmth and heart that it also feels a little like church, and a little like a front stoop in those first warm days of summer.

For instance, Ruiz-Sapp can raise rafters with her voice, but she also feels like an auntie, ready to give advice between pieces (“Always remember the people who brought you here … the ancestors are very much with us in this show,” she said at a recent Sunday matinee), and sometimes during them too. Asia Mark is so fiery that you want her in your corner for every argument. Sapp, whose laser-focus can single out an audience member or beam over the whole house, channels everyone from Gil Scott-Heron to James Weldon Johnson to Reg E. Gaines, but also makes performances entirely his own.  

Steven Sapp in Live From The Edge. The show runs at the Space Ballroom, 295 Treadwell St. in Hamden, Thursdays through Sundays through May 21. T. Charles Erickson Photos.

In part, that’s thanks to an insistence on audience participation that makes the show feel very much alive. While Long Wharf has invited people to engage for years (On The Grounds of Belonging was the first show to formally do so), Live From The Edge takes it to another level. There’s no fourth wall: performers speak directly to the audience, and let them know when the house has gotten too still and cricket-like for them to keep going at full volume. 

While Universes pulls from a specific corpus of work, entr'acte and poetic banter is never exactly the same, and might include brunching jokes, a well-timed dig at Herschel Walker (please and thank you) or a meditation on what it means to be triggered in a world turned on its head. During a recent Sunday matinee, an audience member started responding to the group around Sapp’s ABCs, and didn’t stop until the end of the show.  

“That was good,” he said at one point, his voice floating forward from the fifth row. Later, riffing on a brunch reference Njikam had dropped moments before, he dubbed a piece worthy of syrup-soaked waffles. Before leaving, he thanked the ensemble for its work, noting that he had never experienced a performance so close to his own Jamaican and Dominican roots.   

As Njikam pointed out early in the show, maybe this is the difference between theatre, a largely passive activity in which actors act and attendees consume (but imagine it with a purring British accent), and the-ā-ter, which relies on audience participation and real-time feedback. The result is a work of art that both pulls in the audience and holds members accountable, asking them to carry on the message long after the lights have faded to black. 

Live From The Edge runs at the Space Ballroom, 295 Treadwell St. in Hamden, Thursdays through Sundays through May 21. T. Charles Erickson Photos.

It’s also a statement, delivered in tight verse, of what Long Wharf intends to be as it moves into itinerancy, and it spreads its feelers across Greater New Haven. In September and October, staged readings of Jelly’s Last Jam and Flying Bird’s Diary presented one kind of pop-up model, in which short, hard-hitting performances got a few days in the spotlight. This presents another, in which the boundary between audience and performer is not only porous, but also generative and sustained.

Long Wharf has room for both, the theater seems to say with this show. In other words, it’s possible to grieve for the old space and still welcome that which is to come. 

That the performance feels like home, meanwhile, is perhaps a sign that the theater is settling into this next chapter. Sapp and Ruiz-Sapp first came to New Haven in 2002, during an open mic night for Bregamos Community Theater. At the time, Bregamos was so young that it didn’t yet have its brick-and-mortar home on Blatchley Avenue, and still used the back room at BAR downtown. In an interview with the Arts Paper earlier this year, Sapp remembered it as feeling instantly like family.  

The group has graced New Haven many times since, including in 2012 for the International Festival of Arts & Ideas and in 2020 as the playwrights in residence at Long Wharf Theatre. Because of the timing, the two navigated a pandemic from their home in Ashland, Ore., working with some of New Haven’s budding poets and playwrights across the distance. In that time, they also watched the theater pivot, sticking with it as it charted a path towards itinerancy that began in early 2022. 

They’re still rolling with Long Wharf, and if the show is any indication, they want the audience to, too. Nowhere was that clearer than the end of a recent performance, as ensemble members thanked the audience for coming, then dipped into an excerpt of the group’s 2009 Ameriville. The work, written after dozens of on-the-ground interviews in New Orleans, seeks to tell the deeply human story of what really happened when the levees broke during Hurricane Katrina. 

In its score, one hears the histories of jazz, gospel, blues, and spoken word poetry, meshed together to feel sacred (a nod to Nate John Mark, whose voice can shape-shift hundreds of times). In the audience, where Mmmms! And Yeses! And snaps had been plentiful, it was for a moment quiet enough to hear a pin drop. This wasn’t meekness or ennui; it was reverence.  

“It is good to be in community with each other,” Ruiz-Sapp said. “I’ll take it any chance I get.” 

A performance of Universes and Long Wharf Theatre, Live From The Edge runs at the Space Ballroom, 295 Treadwell St., through May 21. A number of auxiliary events will accompany the show, including a “Tiny Stage” poetry performance on May 12 and American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation on May 19 and 20. Tickets and more information are available here.