The Harmony of 'Brewster Place'

Musical's Creator Blends Complex Novel With '70s-Inspired Score

In the theater world, Tim Acito is a triple threat. When the musical version of "The Women of Brewster Place" opens Friday at Arena Stage, Acito's name will be listed three times: He wrote the music, the lyrics and the script.

Acito, 39, first encountered the story (the musical is based on Gloria Naylor's award-winning novel of the same name) during a brief stint as a high school English teacher in New Jersey, and as a playwright he saw its potential for the stage.

"The novel had all the profound qualities you look for in adaptation: good characters, important themes, sociopolitical and philosophical insights -- it was all right there," says Acito, a three-time Drama Desk Award nominee.

He adds: "I was struck by the cadence and rhythm of Naylor's prose. Her word choices, her characterizations: There was an inherent musicality there. It just felt so natural to try to bring it to the world of musical theater."

The world-premiere musical, as in Naylor's novel, is set in the 1970s and explores the gritty underside of the lives of 10 African American women in an inner-city housing project. The women, whose lives are as rundown and dead-end as the project, come together to face the realities of poverty, racism and neglect. (This is Arena Stage's last production in its Southwest Washington home before moving to a temporary site in Crystal City while its Maine Avenue theater is being renovated and expanded.)

Acito, who has been working on the adaptation for three years, says he wanted to capture not only the grimness of these women's lives but also their power and humor. "You want to do justice to the writing, to make audiences love the characters, even though they are flawed, and have people laugh -- there is more humor here than you might expect! -- as well as be moved by the poignancy or brutality at certain points," he says.

Acito, who has a master of fine arts in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama, has a background in dance and classical piano, but he credits a childhood's worth of listening to an eclectic mix of AM radio in the 1970s as one of his major musical influences.

"The Women of Brewster Place" score, he says, "is inspired by a wide variety of styles from the mid-1970s: the raucous funk of Parliament Funkadelic, the quiet lyricism of Roberta Flack, the haunting urban landscapes of Curtis Mayfield, the joyous disco of Gloria Gaynor and everything in between." Acito says careful listeners will also hear a few examples of even earlier music, including "Billie Holiday-esque blues numbers as well as a spiritual." The score may be rooted in the 1970s, he says, but the form draws from musical theater's long-standing tradition, in which "the songs come directly out of the dramatic action, serving to advance the story and deepen character."

In Naylor's book, several short stories are linked to create the larger story, a form Acito describes as "not quite novel, not quite story collection." When the book is read as a whole, the parts coalesce for an engaging and poignant narrative of an entire community.

"It's a complex work that addresses a lot of big, even Shakespearean, themes. Trying to bring it all together into a cohesive story has been a glorious challenge," he says.

For Acito, the goal was to remain faithful to the heart and soul of Naylor's story while creating his own production. He found himself coming back to the connections between stories, between characters, to weave the play together.

"You have to balance what you believe are the most important parts of the story with what your instinct tells you are the parts that are best put to music," Acito says of the adaptation process.

"It's a hard reality to face, but parts of the novel that were just so beautiful on the page don't always translate to the stage; that is just the nature of theater."

The Women of Brewster Place Arena Stage, 1101 Sixth St. SW 202-488-3300 http://www.arenastage.org Through Dec. 9 $57-$76 The Women of Brewster Place Arena Stage, 1101 Sixth St. SW 202-488-3300 http://www.arenastage.org Through Dec. 9 $57-$76