Lemon Anderson/ COUNTY OF KINGS: the beautiful struggle

In the first minutes of Lemon Anderson’s spoken word autobiography, I was hit with a sense of dread. He began with a poetic introduction that had me fearing an entire performance filled with spoken word and hip hop clichés. Luckily, my first impression was wrong. Anderson wove together his personal narrative with poetic interludes that were a montage of the hip hop trends influencing each segment of his drama. For most of the performance, he was able to maintain a fine balance between the heart-breaking aspects of his story and the inherent humor of growing up. The overall piece came off to me as a beautiful rendition of a life amidst the influence of hip hop, AIDS, and drugs in a Brooklyn apartment block.
Anderson’s strongest moments were those where he invoked the characters of his youth. Highlights of this included a scene where his girlfriend told the story of getting together with him, and a scene where he played an old woman in his Apartment courtyard obscenely summing up the culture around him. In one of the great comedic segments of the story, he even managed to fully inhabit the character of himself aping Andy Gibb on television. This was a strong scene because he was so clearly able to step out of his own experience and then render it for the audience. The weaker aspects of the performance came from the moments when he simply told his story (often coming to conclusions about those experiences for the audience). This was most notable in the tales of going to jail in the second half of the night. His monologue worked best, as is often the case with poetry, when he showed the glimpses of his life instead of telling the audience about them. Despite those moments of self-consciousness, the performance was riveting to watch. Anderson structured the story incredibly well using the poetic interludes to set the tone for each part of the narrative. Where many spoken word artists would get lost in their own verbiage, he creates a cohesive story that uses language to illustrate the beauty, comedy, and sadness of his early life. The best compliment for Anderson’s performance comes at the end. When he tells his dead mother that he will be a star, no one in the audience is giggling or outright laughing. To pull off that ending, you need to have really sold your audience on the character and on your own abilities.
Posted by: Donald Allgeier