Woods takes stage in DuBois

Organizers of the ongoing Black History Month celebration transformed the DuBois College House multipurpose room into a makeshift theater yesterday evening to welcome actress and performer Renn Woods. Yet the multipurpose room's poor acoustics, the recent death of one of Woods' friends and the absence of her drummer prevented Woods from performing all but one of the songs she and pianist John Stephens, a College senior, had rehearsed last week. "I don't cancel," Woods told the approximately 25 audience members. She complemented a short excerpt from her one-woman show, Roots of an Empress Like Me, with a question-and-answer session and a showing of several television clips to entertain for roughly 45 minutes. "Being a true actress, she ad-libbed," said Jack Lewis, assistant director of the African-American Resource Center. In the sketch from Roots of an Empress Like Me, which is based on Woods' experiences working on Alex Haley's 1977 television miniseries Roots, Woods discussed an incident in which the miniseries asked her to bare her upper body before the camera. "Take down your top" was the command, she said. After she resisted and "cried a river" in her Savannah hotel room, Woods -- a teenager at the time -- said Haley knocked on her door and offered his support like an "enlightened master" who recognized a "troubled" spirit. "I kept my chin up and I kept my top up," said the actress whose television credits now include NYPD Blue, The Jeffersons and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. Woods was not the only performer yesterday in DuBois. Stephens, musical director for the a cappella group Counterparts and a pianist on the Grammy Award-nominated album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, accompanied Woods on piano and played solo during the several times Woods left the stage. Stephens, who has his own album coming out in mid-March, said his three rehearsals with Woods helped him to "grow as an artist." And Woods, too, is still growing as an artist. She informed audience members that over the next five years she will work on a musical, novel, screenplay and soundtrack for Empress. The AARC, the Afro-American Studies Program and the Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture, sponsored Thursday's event after Woods contacted them. She said she has "an affection" for Penn because her fiancee's father graduated here. Woods plans on returning to the DuBois multipurpose room in the future. "I want to play in this room -- really play -- with musicians and a full blown set," she said.

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