As Soskin, Riddley has her work cut out for her. Assessing her 95 years, she movingly retells prior challenges and regrets while standing strong. Allen starts out with a bit of childhood overplaying for Little Betty, but grows into the indispensable role.
Married Betty (Aidaa Peerzada) faces the most ups and downs, marrying music impresario Mel Reid, adopting one child and having four more, and raising them while running the family record store, (if you thought Too Short was the first to sell records out of the trunk, think again). Married Betty moves to Walnut Creek and fights in vain at a school board meeting to change its white supremacist culture, and eventually divorces after Mel blows their money on gambling and other women.
Enter Revolutionary Betty (Lucca Troutman), who stands on Soskin’s kitchen table to announce her new identity: folk singing Civil Rights activist. When Married Betty explains that she moved to Walnut Creek for her family, Revolutionary Betty retorts: “If you gave a damn about your family, you wouldn’t’ve moved them out here with all these threaten-to-burn-your-house-down-’cause-they’re-suburban-crackers in the first place!”
Soskin’s songs — recently unearthed on reel-to-reel tapes stored in a box for decades — address police brutality, Black identity, and the spate of church burnings in the South, with shades of Odetta and Nina Simone. It’s after we learn that Soskin stops writing songs amid the crack epidemic in order to save the family record store that we hear one of her most beautiful compositions, with complex jazz chords played on guitar by Troutman.
Additional songs by the show’s music director Daniel Savio propel scenes of tragedy and joy. A lonely saxophone soundtracks a ship explosion in that kills 320 people, including the predominantly Black servicemen chosen to handle dangerous ammunition and torpedoes. And an upbeat jazz number enlivens a house party that allows Laura Elaine Ellis’ choreography, and standout dancers Ahja Henry and Marc Cunanan Chappelle, to shine.
If anyone out there wants to throw a million dollars at this play, please do; a higher production budget could give it the polish it deserves. Mikiko Uesugi’s set design is sparse, just a bed, dresser, table and door, and the offstage band does an able job with the constraints of their size. Both should have more texture. Especially because, aside from a recurring, not-fully-fleshed-out thread involving Soskin’s son David (and a tad too much interpretive aerial dance for my personal tastes), the play itself is nearly flawless.
A key moment comes early, when the San Francisco Chronicle calls the apartment, hearing of the break-in and wanting to include Soskin in a story about the uptick in Bay Area crime. “No,” Soskin says, dreaming aloud of the day the newspaper calls to talk about harmful toxins in Richmond’s air and water, or the income inequality between the hills and the flatlands.
Soskin didn’t wait for the call. She told her own story, her way. With skill and heart, Sign My Name to Freedom brings it to a new audience that should leave the theater like I did: inspired.