What is a theater director to do when handed an alleged comedy whose text contains almost nothing that is funny? The best ones would say, “No, thanks,” and move on to the next item in the stack. Others might simply instruct the actors to shout, declaim, pull faces, wave their arms, and deliver their lines in exaggerated tones. The style will be familiar to those who have endured such screen comics as Martin Lawrence and Kevin Hart, whose lowest-common-denominator shtick rarely attracts critical rapture.
But Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch (at the Music Box Theatre) is a special case. Set in Georgia in the Civil Rights Era, it’s about blacks scheming to reclaim something from their employer, a blithely racist white plantation-owner whose ancestors enslaved the blacks’ ancestors and who cheats the descendants to this day by selling them rancid meat from his commissary, where their wages end up going. Such a play can be relied upon to be praised for its anti-racism by The New York Times (as this one was) and dubbed hilarious without getting into specifics. The Times review didn’t identify any moment in the show as funny, because there isn’t one, unless you are a partisan of wild gesticulating and screaming loud enough to be heard on Ninth Avenue.
Purlie, which hasn’t had a single commercial production since it played on Broadway in 1961, is being received as a masterpiece of satire. Oh? Then why hasn’t anyone mounted it in more than sixty years? The answer is obvious: as directed by Kenny Leon, the play (which isn’t a satire but a farce) by the actor-author-activist Ossie Davis has little to offer. The actors, led by the Hamilton Tony winner Leslie Odom Jr. as the scheming titular preacher and especially Kara Young as an idiot named Lutiebelle—the preacher plucks her out of a church chorus with instructions to pretend that she is his deceased cousin to collect an inheritance from the white man who owns the farm they are on—bellow their way through the text. You probably haven’t seen this much ham since Easter dinner.
You probably haven’t seen this much ham since Easter dinner.
The mark for the scam is a giant buffoon in a linen suit named Ol’ Cap’n Cotchipee (Jay O. Sanders) who clashes with his liberal son, Charlie (Noah Robbins, stepping into a role originated by Alan Alda), a supporter of desegregation whose politics bedevil his father. Charlie has in effect been raised by the Cap’n’s loving domestic, Idella (Vanessa Bell Calloway), who keeps the old man on a short leash—she can make him do her bidding simply by threatening not to make one of the lunches he loves; a widower, he can hardly be expected to cook for himself. The comic centerpiece is a long scene in which Purlie and his sister-in-law Missy (Heather Alicia Sims), who is married to his grinnin’ and steppin’ Uncle Tom brother Gitlow (Billy Eugene Jones), watch on tenterhooks as the unlettered and crass Lutiebelle tries to convince the almost equally doltish farm owner that she is Cousin Bee, a dignified college graduate who is entitled to the $500 that was promised her late mother. The supposed laugh lines are remarks like these: Purlie shouting, “if it’s one thing I am foolproof in, it’s white folks’ psychology!” or “Some of the best pretending in the world is done in front of white folks!” or (this is Gitlow, asked by the Cap’n how he got the knot on his head after Missy thumped him) “Missy! I mean, a mosquito!” Critics who would never ordinarily praise such low humor are either putting their brains on standby for the evening or simply dissembling in the belief that being false to their readers serves a larger truth.
After his scheme comes a cropper, Purlie redoubles his efforts and the play stops dead so that he can deliver a long, angry sermon about the plight of black people. This portion of the play is utterly in earnest and extremely out of place. No satirist worth the title would let the mask slip and issue a fire-and-brimstone address explaining what he’s angry about. This monologue is the most up-to-the-minute aspect of the play, however: everyone presenting works about race these days treats the audience like children who have to be told what to think. “How come,” thunders Purlie, “it’s always the colored folks got to do all the forgiving? How come the only cheek gets turned in this country is the Negro cheek?” Makes sense, assuming no black person has ever committed a crime against a white person. In 2023, cartoonishly oversimplified themes presented like outdoor advertising win you nothing but praise if the subject is race.
At the outset of Jaja’s African Hair Braiding (at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre through November 5), which is set in a Harlem hair salon in the summer of 2019, a customer enters in the morning and is asked what kind of style she would like. She is thinking, maybe . . . micro-braids? From the audience: loud groans. Laughs. Tsk-tsking. All baffling to me: what are micro-braids? The customer doesn’t leave her chair until after nine o’clock that night, giving those of us who have little experience with how black women manage their hair some idea of the travails they endure.
I confess to being outside the target audience for Jocelyn Bioh’s mostly comic play, but I respected its jocular, friendly tone. Until the closing minutes, which introduce an improbable dramatic element in order to contrive an ending, the play about African immigrants chatting and quarreling and telling stories while they coif American customers aspires only to generate laughs and appreciation of the subculture it depicts. As always with such works, however, it raises the question of why the audience should pay Broadway prices for what amounts to the live presentation of a sitcom. That the audience it solicits has proven forever resistant to Broadway’s allure makes the question doubly relevant.
Boo to those who enforce immigration law!
Of the roughly twenty black-oriented Broadway productions of the post-Floyd era, hardly any would have been considered strong enough to take on Broadway pre-Floyd (and as far as I can tell, all of them have lost money, suggesting a certain element of self-flagellation to the impulse). Jaja, from the nonprofit Manhattan Theatre Club, continues the run of insistent mediocrity. Marie (Dominique Thorne), who is the daughter of the salon owner and came over with her from Senegal at age four, is a young woman who yearns to go to college and fears getting stuck in her mother’s trade. She opens the store in the morning for a team of stylists that includes the loud, abrasive Bea (Zenzi Williams); the gullible Aminata (Nana Mensah), whose no-account husband (Michael Oloyede) is obviously cheating on her; and the dreamer Miriam (Brittany Adebumola), who was stuck in an unhappy marriage until she reconnected with a fellow Sierra Leonean immigrant she had known in the old country in childhood. Customers include an ambitious editorial assistant in journalism, Jennifer (Rachel Christopher), who spends all day getting those hair attachments with micro-braids. The salon owner, Jaja (Somi Kakoma), is absent for most of the play as it is her wedding day; she’s marrying a white man in a business arrangement in order to secure a green card. When she finally turns up, she’s ebullient in a tightly fitted mermaid dress, but alas, according to the play, there are menacing vans full of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents prowling the streets of New York City looking for Jajas to sweep up and deport.
This late development, which is about as plausible as a sudden invasion of alien robots, is an attempt at a tearjerking maneuver that leads to some comforting late lines about how all the women will be fine as long as they help each other. It also gives the play some last-minute sociopolitical freight. Boo to those who enforce immigration law! Never mind that the play arrives at a moment when New York—whose mayors have for years boasted that it is a “sanctuary city” set on thwarting federal enforcement efforts—is not only welcoming all immigrants who claim refugee status but actually providing them with hotel rooms, by the thousands.
Don’t they read The New York Times?
I was more taken by the play’s unspoken message. The piece is set in July of 2019, a few weeks before the phrase “The 1619 Project” joined the popular vernacular as the editor of The New York Times announced that (since his paper’s exhaustive attempts to uncover a Donald Trump–Vladimir Putin conspiracy had fizzled out) he would henceforth focus his staff’s energy on unmasking alleged systemic racism in the United States. Jaja and her team are black people who fled black countries run by black leaders in order to live in a 13 percent black country, and each of them loves her new homeland and has an iron determination to stay there at whatever cost. Though their resources are miniscule, they discuss how to come up with the funds to pay the going rate (seven to ten thousand dollars) for defrauding their way towards obtaining the magical green card via fake marriages. Bioh, the playwright (a child of African immigrants), notes through Jaja that anything is possible here because, “After all, this is America!” Why can’t these people grasp that America is foundationally determined to undermine them at every turn? Don’t they read The New York Times?
The Refuge Plays (at the Laura Pels Theatre through November 12) is an ambitious, three-and-a-half hour seriocomic work (singular despite the title) that begins close to the present day and leaps back a generation twice, in its second and third acts, with breaks in between. It has the trappings of a big, meaty piece of theater—major themes, an expansive vision, a sweep of time—but never coheres in a satisfying way.
Combining elements of Southern Gothic with middling comedy—Faulkner as adapted for Thursday nights at eight on nbc—the work by Nathan Alan Davis (no relation to Ossie) delves into the history of a quarrelsome but loving black family, four generations of whom live under the same roof in the woods of Southern Illinois. They are routinely visited by ghosts of deceased family members, who are genial and helpful and who even provide financial aid. Nice to have guardian angels with actual cash to give away.
We’re in the realm of myth here, sort of.
The matriarch, Early (Nicole Ari Parker), built the place with her late husband, Crazy Eddie (Daniel J. Watts). He pops in, in ghost form, along with their dead son, Walking Man (Jon Michael Hill), whose appearance explains what it’s like to get killed by a cow. (He was stabbing it in the neck when the beast rolled over on top of him.) His widow, Gail (Jessica Frances Dukes), is crabby until one of the spirits informs her that she will die tomorrow night, which paradoxically lightens her mood and turns her into an angel of serenity. Her daughter, Joy (Ngozi Anyanwu), is also surprisingly equable about the situation. Her son, Ha-Ha (J. J. Wynder), a sensitive, college-aged boy fixated on James Baldwin who wonders aloud whether college is a place where they let you read all the time, is in the dark about the looming death, having been distracted by a ghost who gave him some money and told him to “go buy some pussy” in the city, which is Carbondale. Instead, he went to a coffee shop and asked a nice-seeming girl to be his friend. She, Symphony (Mallori Taylor Johnson), who at first seems like a college student but later comes across as a drifter or runaway, said yes. At the same time, her car was stolen, so she agreed to come home with the boy. His relatives want to know if they are “doing the thing.” In the closing minutes of the first act, the play gets around to invoking the title as the barely sketched Symphony starts to feel at home.
The importance of having a home, lights that signal the presence of spirits, jocular ghosts, and a pickup truck are recurring elements as the play goes back in time in its second act to focus on the much younger Walking Man as he bonds with his eccentric, probably gay uncle Dax (Lance Coadie Williams) and learns from the ghosts of his grandparents (Lizan Mitchell, Jerome Preston Bates) that he is the product of a rape, which enrages him and sparks an extremely short-lived campaign of vengeance. He vows to cut down every tree in the forest and turn each log into a spear so he can kill his natural father, and also every man similar to his hated sire, but changes his mind when the sweet young Gail floats into his existence like a wood nymph. The third act, in which Walking Man is a newborn, recounts the first meeting of Crazy Eddie and Early, who, after becoming pregnant via means she doesn’t want to discuss with her visitor, has spent the entire winter alone in the woods, having killed a bear with a hammer, moved into its den, and sheltered there with the meat for sustenance. So the cave was warm enough to sustain a mother and her infant, but also cold enough for the meat not to spoil? Okay. We’re in the realm of myth here, sort of.
Those last two words are widely applicable throughout. The play, straightforwardly directed by Patricia McGregor, is sort of touching, but not deeply. It’s sort of funny. Or so the audience seemed to think; a big laugh ensued when Early, having refused all offers of food from Crazy Eddie after he shows up in his pickup truck to court her, changes her mind and rips a bag of potato chips out of his hand. It sort of has ideas, but not really. Like many other contemporary playwrights, Davis gestures vaguely in the general direction of his themes without developing them in any interesting ways. The audience is expected to mistake the play’s occasional and climactic references to the importance of having a place to live (in the final moments, Crazy Eddie and Early resolve to pool their energies and build together the home we have seen in the first act) for something like a grand unifying thesis on the nature of Home when it’s barely more than a notion. As for the play’s supernatural elements, which involve bright white costuming for the ghost characters, they aren’t as hokey as they sound, but they’re only sort of compelling. The highest praise I can muster for The Refuge Plays is that it has a warm, lived-in feeling, the characters seem like they could be someone’s actual family, and it doesn’t get bogged down in (nor even mention) racism. A play that rates as merely tolerable is, however, unlikely to strike many as an astute investment of three and a half hours.