Aurora Theatre Company · Theatre
Crumbs From the Table of Joy
“Sound designer Ray Archie’s subtle effects are tremendously helpful in creating the illusion of Godfrey and Gerte sitting side-by-side on the subway.”
The sound
A 1950 Brooklyn basement heard from the inside out — each character carrying their own music, memory doing the rest.
The design builds the Crump family’s world in layers: a period Brooklyn street — trolleys, children playing, Yiddish and Klezmer filtering through the walls — heard muffled from the basement, marking the family as outsiders. Each character gets a sonic signature: Godfrey’s gospel and the enforced Sunday silence of Father Divine’s rules; Lily’s bebop, blues, and mambo as vibrant disruption; Ernestine’s 1950s film-score underscore as she narrates, her sewing machine a recurring motif; Gerte’s hesitant European classical fragments. The remembered South arrives non-diegetically — a whip-poor-will call, filtered like a distant memory, standing in for irretrievable loss. Racism is punctuated by jarring cues: a smashed glass Coca-Cola bottle. Sound becomes the battleground where the family’s competing values — tradition vs. modernity, faith vs. liberation — are sonically enacted.
Press
“Sound designer Ray Archie’s subtle effects are tremendously helpful in creating the illusion of Godfrey and Gerte sitting side-by-side on the subway.”
Stage and Cinema · Barry Willis
“Aurora Theatre’s production of Lynn Nottage’s play about a Great Migration family seems tailor-made for 2025.”
San Francisco Chronicle · Lily Janiak
“A marvelously directed and performed production.”
Talkin’ Broadway · Patrick Thomas
“Entertaining, engaging, and engrossing.”
Culture Vulture · Emily S. Mendel