New shows at Horizon and True Colors strike a few common chords

“Shakin’ the Rafters”

Opens Friday and continues through Aug. 4. 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays; 11 a.m. Wednesday (July 17 only). $15-$60. 14th Street Playhouse, 173 14th St., Atlanta. 1-877-725-8849. www.truecolorstheatre.org.

Call it an embarrassment of riches. Two of the summer’s biggest and most promising shows both open this weekend.

Horizon Theatre’s “Every Tongue Confess,” written by Marcus Gardley, involves a series of black church burnings in 1996 Alabama while telling the stories of how members of one congregation confront some of their own burning secrets. The show features flights of magical realism, among other stylistic flourishes, and incorporates traditional and original blues and gospel music into the play.

“Shakin’ the Rafters,” a world-premiere production conceived and directed by David H. Bell for Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre, is a more straightforward musical about a family of black gospel singers touring the South in the late 1950s. Tensions mount from without and within the group, but over the course of the story they perform several full-blown numbers, both traditional and original.

The thematic similarities between the two shows are fairly unmistakable. Best of all, so is the fact that they’re being staged by two of Atlanta’s most creative and proven directing talents.

Although he’s currently based in Chicago, where he runs the music-theater program at Northwestern University, Bell spent the bulk of the 1990s here as associate artistic director to Leon at the Alliance. Most recently, he returned to premiere his popular Bessie Smith musical, “Gut Bucket Blues,” for True Colors in 2010.

Jones was a co-founder of Jomandi, which thrived through much of the ’80s and ’90s as one of the first local theaters geared to developing black audiences, before the company disbanded in 2000. Since then, he has become a frequent collaborator with Horizon co-artistic director Lisa Adler, writing, directing and/or acting in such hits as “Three Sistahs” (2006) and “Sheddin’” (2012).

“Lisa created a home for me at a time when nobody else in Atlanta was hiring me and we’ve done one show together every season for 10 years now,” Jones said. “She’s very passionate about the work and committed to the plays Horizon does and she’s one of the first people who realized that there was a large black audience that wasn’t being served back then, especially during the summer months when a lot of other theaters were dormant.”

Gardley’s play “lends itself to a certain theatricality that always intrigues and inspires me (and) there’s a poetic quality about the writing that transports the show in new and different directions,” he said. “It takes on the history of racial politics in a country where everybody’s culpable, but it’s not about assigning blame or guilt. It’s about accepting responsibility for our shared history.”

Because so much of the story takes place in a church, the music is an integral part of the play. The script includes a number of standard spirituals, but Horizon’s musical director, S. Renee Clark, has also composed a handful of other songs. Among the cast performing them: Minka Wiltz, Enoch King, Bernardine Mitchell and Victor Love.

As Jones notes, “The songs set the proper environment for the world in which the story exists, but they also advance the characters and the narrative of the play.”

So it goes, too, in Bell’s new show.

“We use traditional gospel songs whenever (the family is) actually performing as a group, but we also needed songs that could express specific things about the characters or the story that the usual catalog titles just didn’t address,” he said.

Bell wrote the lyrics for about a dozen new songs scored by the show’s musical director, Robert Deason, and he wrote several of the roles with specific Atlanta actors in mind: LaParee Young, Chandra Currelly, Latrice Pace and Adrienne Reynolds.

While the racial strife of the era is very much a part of the story, “It’s mostly a show about family and this volatile group of sisters,” Bell said. “Living together and working together as intensely as they do, that gives them an insular quality that both bonds and alienates them. They triumph from the very co-dependency they think they hate. What they think is their greatest liability is actually their greatest strength.”