Mrs. Mackenzie’s Beginner’s Guide to the Blues
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Mrs. Mackenzie’s Beginner’s Guide to the Blues likewise recognizes the issue of cultural appropriation, the intertwining of love and theft, while engaging in it itself. Now receiving its Chicago premiere in Jessi D. Hill’s exceptional production at Stage Left, the play is about a white high school music teacher in Minnesota who falls in love with one of her white students in part because they share a passion for Delta blues. This is a form not merely originating with black people but still claimed by them. (At the start of Black Ensemble Theater’s Muddy Waters (The Hoochie-Coochie Man), the chorus sings, “We made the blues, it belongs to us.”) Though playwrights Patty Lynch and Kent Stephens glance in the direction of the blues’ source–the enslavement of African-Americans–they don’t take a full look; like others, they’re content to let the tropes of one culture serve the purposes of another.
Lynch and Stephens do show how the adoption of blues music by an unhappily married woman from “a town in Wisconsin named after a square dance move” transforms both the music and its myths. Though Suzanne Mackenzie is determined to teach the original blues, she undermines her own effort by identifying these songs as anthems for the hard times, losses, and imprisonments all people experience.
Meanwhile, they can thank Stage Left for a flawless production. Under Dan Slyman’s music direction, Tim Gittings, Dan Moran, and Dan Waring thoroughly defeat the notion that only black people can sing the blues. Geoff Rice as Tyler makes a persuasive musical transition from tentative early efforts to mature work as a bluesman. And McKnight’s understated a cappella solos are the show’s most moving moments.
