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Speaking
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THE INDEPENDENT
Speaking of Stories: Fine Actors Read Great Stories Fannie Flagg, Richard Jones, Rudolph Willrich, and Nambi E. Kelley reading; directed by Karin delaPeña; at the Lobero Theatre, Monday, February 21 Speaking of Stories has become, indelibly, part of Santa Barbara’s cultural lexicon; its "Theater of the Mind" is a refreshing and much-needed dose of oral-storytelling in a mostly digital age. Now in is sixth season, nothing told of its popularity as well as the packed house on a rainy night, which board member Steven Gilbar jubilantly pointed out while announcing the first reader. As the rain beat its own rhythm on the roof of the Lobero, we in the audience were held in thrall by Nambi E. Kelley reading Maya Angelou’s poems—a Stories tradition, interspersing poems with the prose—"The First Day" and "Come and Be My Baby" in her rich, sweet voice. The first story, E. Annie Proulx’s "The Half-Skinned Deer," was read by character actor Richard Jones. The piece's backwoods humor and strange ending was in good hands with Jones, whose resonant, low-pitched voice rose and fell with the music of the writing, easily summoning to mind images of a Wyoming I have never visited. Seeing Fannie Flagg up at the podium was a dream come true, and hearing her warm, lyrical Alabama accent conjuring up the small-town characters of Eudora Welty’s "Why I Live at the P.O." was positively spellbinding—and hilarious. Flagg has a fairy-godmother charm about her—her flexible voice and charming expressions could bring color to the most drab of surroundings. She didn’t lose her audience for a second and seems the best person possible to read Welty’s writing, with all its subtle humor and eccentrically ordinary characters. It was a half-hour no one attended is likely to forget. Rudolph Willrich had a hard act to follow, but when he read Thomas Meehan’s surrealistic "Yma Dream," the audience broke out into sniggers of enraptured, childlike laughter all the while. It was a difficult story to get one’s mouth around, what with all the names of guests that attend the writers dream party—"Uma, Yma, Ida, Hugo, Elia, Aga, Ira"—but Willrich carried it off without a ripple. I don’t remember being so captivated, even as
a child, by stories read aloud. Good dreamtime fare to nourish the internal
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