‘Sugar’ offers the stories, shocks of life with diabetes

Theater Review

January 15, 2012|By Jeffrey Gantz

Robbie McCauley outside the Paramount Center, where she will perform her… (Matthew J. Lee/Globe staff)

Emerson College performing arts professor Robbie McCauley has had a glittering performance career of her own. In 1976, she originated the role of Clara in Adrienne Kennedy’s “A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White,’’ which the experimental theater director Joseph Chaikin staged at the New York Shakespeare Festival.

She played the Lady in Red in the original 1976 Broadway production of Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.’’

At the conclusion of “Sally’s Rape,’’ McCauley’s drama about the victimization of her great-great-grandmother as a slave on a Georgia plantation, she stood naked on an auction block. That piece won a 1992 Obie Award for best new American play, in a three-way tie with Paula Vogel’s “The Baltimore Waltz’’ and Donald Margulies’s “Sight Unseen.’’

Now, in her new one-woman show, premiering at ArtsEmerson Friday through Jan. 29, McCauley strikes a more autobiographical note. “Sugar’’ is about slavery and racism, but it’s also about growing up in Columbus, Ga., and then being diagnosed with type 1, or juvenile, diabetes.

When it comes to serious diseases, diabetes is the elephant in the room. It’s seldom cited as a primary cause of death. It does not get much attention even when it strikes a celebrity such as Mary Tyler Moore. Moore was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes just when “The Mary Tyler Moore Show’’ was starting up more than 40 years ago; she’s taken insulin ever since, and now, at 75, she has lost much of her vision. Yet you are more likely to read about whether Moore is Botoxing than about how she is coping with her disease.

Diabetes is also, McCauley notes, “one of those diseases that has blame associated with it. If you took care of yourself . . . Blame and shame.’’

She articulates this while sitting with her director, Emerson performing arts professor Maureen Shea, on one of the comfortable sofas in the second-floor lobby of the Paramount Center. We can hear people working on the set in the Jackie Liebergott Black Box theater as we talk.

“My official diagnosis didn’t happen until I was in my early 20s,’’ McCauley says, “but I realized all my life that something was off in my body. And as I look back, there were small symptoms that might have been called pre-diabetes. I was very thin, which is a symptom of juvenile diabetes. So there were resonances of it in my body at a very early age, but it wasn’t diagnosed until much later.’’