![[Company Logo Image]](../../images/logo.gif){kind=logo}
Innovative works of live performance for multicultural audiences.
Shaping Ideas into theatrical events.
|
Innovative works of live performance for multicultural audiences. Shaping Ideas into theatrical events.
|
|
|
Chicago Sun-TimesSeptember 21, 2006
Uneven “African” looks at theater history
By Heidi Weiss
If asked to pinpoint the origins of a black theater movement in this country, some might say it all began during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ‘30s, while others would assert it was rooted in the 1960s, when the civil rights movement reached it zenith.
As it happens, African-American theater flourished as early as 1821. That’s when a retired steamship steward by the name of William Henry Brown created the African Grove – a little tea garden and cabaret – in the back of his house in lower Manhattan. Also involved in the project – which soon moved to a more “legitimate” venue – was James Hewlett, a black actor who had served as dresser to George Frederick Cooke, a famous British thespian renowned for his performance in the title role of Shakespeare’s Richard III.” Hewlett himself would go on to master the part of that twisted king.
The story of Brown and Hewlett – and the undermining of their production of “Richard III” by one Stephen Price, a competing white impresario who has the African Company shut down – is the subject of Carlyle Brown’s “The African Company Presents Richard III,” a play first produced in 1994, and now being revived by Congo Square Theatre Company. Brown unearths a fascinating chapter in this country’s racial and theatrical history. But both his play, and the Congo Square production, which has been directed by Aaron Todd Douglas, are uneven.
The problem with the original African Company, as the playwright tells us, was that it was successful, both artistically and critically. And Price viewed its black production of “Richard III” as a threat to his own more high-priced production of the play for which he had “imported” Junius Brutus Booth, the fabled British actor (who would go on to father actors Edwin Booth and John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Lincoln.
“The African Company” is an attempt to capture the off-stage lives of these struggling black actors and their producer, as well as to give a hint of what their Shakespeare production might have looked like. As one actor in the troupe observes, blacks engage in role-playing all the time when dealing with white society, so acting in the theater is second nature for them.
Hewlett (Anthony Irons) is portrayed as a charismatic actor and fiery, humorously egotistical man. And with his wiry body and angular face, Irons makes you more than curious to know what his own Richard III might be like. At one point, costumed in the king’s royal crimson velvet jacket, he turns his back to the audience and morphs from ramrod straight posture to hunchback – the actor’s art in a nutshell.
Representing the historical roots of these black men is the more mystical figure of Papa Shakespeare (the always intriguing Allen Gilmore), an old Caribbean-bred griot in the African style who even manages to sneak his drum into jail when the company is temporarily arrested.
As William Henry brown, the troupe’s embattled producer, Ronald Conner comes into his own in the scene where he stands up to Price (a dashing Sean Michael Kaplan) and refuses to be bought out and silenced.
As for the women in the African Company troupe, they include: Sarah (the admirably high-energy Jacqueline Williams), who spends her day working for a white socialite who is clearly something of a bohemian and even comes to see her employee perform the role of Queen Elizabeth, and the neophyte actress named Ann Johnson (Ericka Ratcliff), who also has a day job and who is engaged in a budding but rocky romance with Hewlett.
The moral of the story becomes this: Forget about vying for the right to do the work of Shakespeare and other white dramatists. Instead, black writers must begin telling their own stories. That, in fact, was just what the real William Henry Brown went on to do. And it is what the prolific Carlyle Brown is doing as well, nearly two centuries later. |
|
Send mail to
info@carlylebrownandcompany.org with questions
or comments about this web site.
|
