Review: In History Theatre’s ‘Handprints,’ Greta Oglesby converts hurt to honey

Greta Oglesby’s memories in “Handprints” waft over the audience like autumn leaves from a sugar maple.

They’re warm and sweet even when the story the actor is sharing raises questions.

Like the time her father, a preacher, held her and her siblings by their legs upside down outside their Chicago apartment window to teach them a lesson. The kids had dropped water balloons on the heads of passersby.

Or the day that her drag queen neighbor, who had taught her to do her makeup, was assaulted.

Or the time a hot comb burned her head as she got her hair done in an elder’s kitchen.

Time has taken the edge off these events for Oglesby, and she wears the faded scars as badges of honor in her stage memoir efficiently directed by Richard Thompson at St. Paul’s History Theatre.

Using projected shadows that suggest an Aaron Douglas painting, plus expressive puppets on a set by Kirby Moore that extrapolates motifs from a family quilt that Oglesby sometimes dons, she gives us an unvarnished peek into her life.

She’s not alone onstage. Maestro Sanford Moore’s nimble piano playing helps to warm the atmosphere. And Dennis Spears, Oglesby’s longtime scene partner in Penumbra Theatre’s “Black Nativity,” joins her to play a host of supplementary roles, from her father to a schoolgirl bully in pigtails.

Spears also plays CiCi, the kind drag queen, stealing almost all the scenes he’s in. And Oglesby lets him. Such is her assurance and confidence in her own gifts.

Oglesby is best known for being chosen by August Wilson to originate the role of history-bearer Aunt Ester in “Gem of the Ocean” and for headlining “Caroline, or Change” at the Guthrie Theater. She evokes both characters in the second act of “Handprints.”

But the show really is about how Oglesby was made, including the deep influence of a father who believed that love was something that you do, not words that you declare.

Doing a play about one’s own life while one is still making that life is tricky business. But if anyone can do it, it’s Oglesby, who was Phylicia Rashad’s standby on Broadway for “A Raisin in the Sun” and whose cross-country acting career also took her to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Hers is an improbable story of a Rust College accounting graduate who suddenly realizes one day at work that she has been called, not to the expected church ministry, but to the stage. She has been a ferocious theater student in the nearly three decades since, honing her craft to be in both the Shakespearean and Wilson canons.

Oglesby shares her story with generosity and gratitude. As she talks and sings, you can feel the love that made her, and that she gives. In addition to her craft and passion, it is her charisma, or rizz, in the parlance of today’s youth, that makes her such a theatrical force.

For she connects in a soulful way with the audience.

‘Handprints’

Who: Written and performed by Greta Oglesby with Dennis Spears and pianist Sanford Moore. Directed by Richard Thompson.

Where: History Theatre, 30 E. 10th St., St. Paul.

When: 7:30 p.m. Thu.-Sat., 2 p.m. Sun. Ends Feb. 18.

Tickets: $25-$64. 651-292-4323 or historytheatre.com.