History Theatre’s ‘Handprints’ sketches an actor’s life from church to stage

To hear Greta Oglesby tell it, if her father were parenting today, he would probably be reported. A pastor of storefront churches in Chicago, Clem Lacy believed the dictum that sparing the rod meant spoiling the child.

“My daddy would be under somebody’s jail nowadays,” the Chicago-born, Brooklyn Park-based stage star said. “He did the best he could with an eighth-grade education and a world of love in his heart.”

Lacy’s five children, now all educated adults, are prospering all over the country and cannot stop honoring him, Oglesby said. Even after his 2019 death, they continue to gather in his name and have endless, joy-filled repartee.

Oglesby aims to capture that celebratory spirit in “Handprints,” her autobiographical play that is getting its long-delayed premiere Saturday at St. Paul’s History Theatre. Oglesby manipulates puppets in a show in which she is accompanied by pianist Sanford Moore and actor Dennis Spears, who plays her father and other roles.

Lacy had simple values around family and faith, and sometimes loved a little too hard, Oglesby noted.

“Handprints” is being staged by History Theatre’s artistic director Richard Thompson, who identifies so strongly with the script that he says that Oglesby has written his own story. Thompson appreciates that the father is portrayed as an unvarnished, complex character.

“We’re not trying to correct anything or sugarcoat anything,” Thompson said. “We’re just showing a very culturally specific truth with a lot of humor and heart.”

Thompson likened “Handprints to “Treemonisha,” Scott Joplin’s groundbreaking opera that’s set just after slavery in a Southern forest. In the opera, an educated freed woman meets conjurers who sell bones and other artifacts.

In their different ways, both Oglesby’s play and Joplin’s opera wrestle with how old practices fit into a new dispensation.

“What do we retain from the past as we celebrate the journey through challenges — what is the best way to move forward?” Thompson said. “If your people came from Africa, do we still believe there is meaning in cowrie shells? If you are Indigenous, do we still retain the notion that we walk upon the bones of our ancestors?”

From Mama-centered to Papa-focused

“Handprints” was developed over a decade and a half, evolving from idea to book to film and now the stage all, by the power of suggestion.

“The catalyst was us gathering to celebrate my dad’s birthday in Las Vegas,” Oglesby recalled. “As we sat around howling from all these crazy stories, my brother Shane said, ‘Somebody should write them down.’”

Oglesby took up the challenge, collecting tales tall and true, tragic and hilarious, about her kin dear, near and far. They were published in 2012 under the title “Mama ‘n Nem,” and included stories about the trouble she and her siblings sometimes got into growing up as a preacher’s kids. The family went to church so often, they practically lived in them.

One of Oglesby’s funniest stories involves a guest preacher whose beard housed something that looked like an errant food particle. She and her siblings tittered through his whole sermon, their eyes focused entirely on his beard.

“We heard not one word he said,” Oglesby said.

Joe Dowling, then the artistic director of the Guthrie Theater, read the memoir and was so taken with it that he immediately suggested Oglesby adapt it for the stage.

“I thought that was the craziest idea,” Oglesby said. But 10 months later, while on a break in between shows at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where she was on contract, she said to herself, “Hmmm, let me see what I could conjure up.”

She had her first workshop in the living room of Marcela Lorca, who had directed her in one of her biggest roles as the headliner of Tony Kushner’s “Caroline, or Change.” That show sold out performances at the Guthrie and the Syracuse Stage a dozen years ago.

“In the workshop, Marcela asked, where’s the music?” Oglesby recalled. “I had never written a song in my life.”

She teamed up with Moore, the bandleader and arranger best known for founding the vocal group Moore by Four, to compose five songs for the show. Those are added to hymns and gospel numbers in “Handprints,” which also has a lot of underscoring.

“The music not only sets the moods or affirms emotions but also helps to motivate the characters,” Moore said. “It’s just a fundamental part of who these characters are.”

Lorca scheduled a world premiere of “Handprints” in 2020 at Ten Thousand Things Theater, where she had become artistic director. But the pandemic thwarted those plans.

Undeterred, Lorca suggested they switch media, and make a film of the story. She teamed with filmmaker E.G. Bailey to direct a screen version of “Handprints” that had its world premiere at the Capri Theater in north Minneapolis.

Now, at last, as the play gets its first true production, Oglesby is expecting her family to fly in from around the country.

“We’re just pinching ourselves that we get to see the spirit of our beloveds up onstage,” Oglesby said.

For History Theatre, “Handprints” is a stage memoir that shows how magisterial material can be culled from ordinary life.

“I think it’s going to touch people because it’s funny, moving, all the things,” Thompson said. “Greta has reached into her family story and while it’s very specific to her growing up on Chicago’s South Side, her truth-telling allows us to get a glimpse into our own humanity.”

‘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.