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.
