Storytelling and social activism find a home in Tim Barsky
Tim Barsky on stage during The Bright River at the Brava in San Francisco. Photo by Emilie Raguso.
For a man who says he subsists on coffee and cigarettes, Tim Barsky has some heft to him.
The 33-year-old performer and composer will be on stage through February in a revival of his musical one-man show, The Bright River, at the Brava Theater Center in San Francisco.
Barsky describes the play as a hip-hop reimagining of Dante’s Inferno recounted by a traditional storyteller with a live soundtrack. It involves a search through the underworld for a young woman with cystic fibrosis who committed suicide when she learned her sweetheart died fighting in Iraq. Barsky plays all the characters – the soldier, a fixer, the young woman and a raven – accompanied by cellist Alex Kelly, drummer Kevin Carnes and beatboxer Carlos Aguirre. Barsky leaps and struts across stage, rarely taking a breath and never letting the energy drop. As he weaves his woeful tale, changing hats and shifting voices to indicate which role he's playing, sweat runs from the top of his head to the tips of his fingers.
At times the story reaches a cacophonous pitch. In other moments, the sweetness of the music and lyrics is nearly overwhelming. It's a wordsmith's show that, as Barsky raced ahead constructing one complex scene then another, often left me wishing I had the script on hand to consult so I could mull over the nuances of his fine writing.
"I started working on this project at one of the lowest points in my life, when it seemed like the world was literally collapsing," wrote Barsky about the show. "The country was swinging so far to the right I almost felt as if I didn't recognize it anymore. We had a puppet for a president. And all around me, I felt like I was watching my friends, peers, and collaborators get pushed to the brink, and in some cases past it…. The show took off. More than 8,000 people saw it, and more than two dozen Bay Area artists were employed by it. For about a year and a half, it was all I did. Meanwhile, the war continued, but there was at least the sense of being a part of a movement to stop it."
The show ran throughout 2004 and 2005. It closed when it failed to attract enough investment to continue. It's back this year at the Brava, an ornate 100-year-old theater in San Francisco's Mission District.
"I'm not really sure how it happened," said Barsky, as he sipped coffee recently on a break between rehearsal and the show.
Barsky, who lives in south Berkeley, is built like a fire hydrant. He's short and bald with a voice somewhat more nasal than one might expect. He's wowed Bay Area audiences for years with his beatbox flute performances. More recently he's expanded his repertoire to include circus performance and The Bright River.
Barsky describes himself as "stubborn to a self-destructive fault." He was fired from one of his last jobs for refusing to stop making drum sounds with his mouth. He now works fulltime as a performer and writer. Barsky studied Islam and Judaism at Brown University, then left to juggle fire and perform as a clown in Europe. He returned to Brown and became an apprentice to the traditional Jewish storyteller Fishel Bresler of Providence, R.I.
"Jewish folklore has a long tradition of oral storytelling," Barsky said. "Maggid (a wandering Jewish preacher), can be translated as 'wonder rabbi' or 'talker of smack.' Basically, a 'bad mouther.'"
Barsky traces the lineage of Jewish folklore from Shalom Aleichem, a 19th century Ukrainian performer, to Lenny Bruce, Allen Ginsberg, Mel Brooks and Sarah Silverman. He said the storyteller's refusal to go away, and refusal to stay silent during times of injustice, are what draw him to the ancient profession.
Storytelling is at the heart of Barsky's work. Prior to the rise of traditional media, he said, storytellers were the first means for social activists to reach a broad audience. Storytellers were a repository of folk tales, presenting history from the perspective of those who lived and experienced it – not simply those who had the power and money to write it down.
"They were doing it to preserve the past," Barsky said. "It's jazz without the drum and bass. Now I'm using a traditional form, the real tradition, to document the present."
Barsky grew up on the east coast and describes himself when he was a child as a "big time geek." He played flute in band from when he was in grade school, the only boy in a gaggle of girls for many years. At Brown, he got involved with the Providence Black Repertory Company, a theater in Rhode Island "inspired by the cultural traditions of the African Diaspora."
"I started asking myself, 'What does it mean to be a white kid from the suburbs involved with hip hop?'" he said. "As someone from outside the culture, the only white Jewish producer at the theater, there was a lot of static."
Barsky moved from working with the theater as a producer to beatboxing, and eventually incorporated the flute into his performances. As far as he knows, he's the first to have joined the two. Barsky moved to the Bay Area and, from 2001 to 2003, worked in emergency psych with a youth shelter. He staffed the night shift with the goal of going into mobile crisis triage to try to talk down jumpers from the Golden Gate Bridge. He ultimately decided to pursue performance rather than social work, but has continued to work with youth in East Oakland and San Francisco.
"It became a question of how you keep in it your whole life," he said. "I realized I was focusing more on community history than psychiatric health."
For Barsky, folklore is a way to ask fundamental questions that don't have easy answers. Theater provides a space to present such scenarios and allows the audience to "experience stuff you can't get over," he said. He cautioned against the idea of the "false catharsis," in which audience members witness a play and feel better at the resolution though nothing has actually been resolved off stage. But he said he sees hope in the idea of "slowly trying to seize control of the culture" by telling stories, "throwing little pebbles out there, making little sculptures out of kindling and waiting for society to shift."
"This isn't fast food entertainment," he said. "It's seven years and four or five dozen artists who have between them hundreds of years of experience. For seven years, it's been an obsessive weight around my life. I can't promise you a happy ending, or that the world will be a better place at the end of the story. It probably won't be. But the way you tell stories, that's your heart's gift. The world can't work out, but I can make sure that the lights are perfect."
Bright River runs through February 20th at the Brava Theater in San Francisco. Tickets range from $17-$35. Get more info at the Bright River website and tickets are available at Brown Paper Tickets.
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