In ACT’s latest, young women of color are musical visionaries

The young female conservatory students of “||: Girls: ||: Chance: ||: Music: ||” aren’t just talented singers, percussionists and composers. They’re visionaries, and in Eisa Davis’ American Conservatory Theater world premiere, they debate musical ideals like poet-philosophers.

The classical girls, Fax (Hillary Fisher) explains, “want to not reveal themselves — that’s their control.” That philosophy certainly defines her. She hated it when her accompanist improvised during a recital. It’s not that the jazz girls don’t want control, though. Those musicians, she continues, “want their control by revealing themselves in the chaos of real time.”

In the Berkeley-set play, directed by Pam MacKinnon, that struggle for power isn’t just artistic. Davis, a Berkeley homegirl of “Bulrusher” fame, writes with a cellular-level understanding of subtext. Over and over, as the girls move toward divergent careers, the script builds in seismic shifts that require zero or only glancing words. 

Davis, herself a singer-songwriter who’s collaborated with Lin-Manuel Miranda on the concept album “Warriors,” also writes with a practitioner’s understanding. “They think to each other musically,” go one set of stage directions, “saying things they couldn’t say aloud.”