Some seasons, black dramas come and go without much impact or distinction. That already seems unlikely this year.
The fall alone is turning out to be a kind of renaissance in African-American drama in Chicago, with a crop of black-themed shows ranging from the revival of ETA Creative Arts Foundation’s hit musical drama “This Far By Faith,” to Victory Gardens Theater’s premiere of “The Sutherland,” Charles Smith’s drama set in the 1950s South Side hotel and jazz mecca.
One hot young dramatist considered by some to be the next August Wilson is also coming to town to direct his own well-received 1996 play: “Thunder Knocking on the Door,” to be presented by Northlight Theatre in the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie.
And in the city, the Chicago Theater Company is offering the first stage adaptation of one of Walter Mosley’s popular Easy Rawlins detective novels.
These latter two dramas could not be any different in subject matter and style. Mosley’s “A Red Death” takes the hard-boiled, downtrodden, seedy life of post-war L.A. noir fiction and retells it from the black perspective.
Keith Glover’s “Thunder Knocking on the Door” is both a fairy tale and a musical drama turning on the blues, mixing the soulful truth of the music with tales of an enchanted guitar, a blue-eyed conjurer with magical powers and a fable about a blind woman regaining her sight.
“Thunder” is full of lore, both the fanciful folk lore of Southern homespun mythology and the lore of the blues. “I wish I could say I invented it all,” says Glover. “But I was raised in Alabama and surrounded by musicians all my life. The blues is not just a music, it’s a lifestyle. I grew up believing in certain folk tales, that someone could put an evil eye on you, for instance.”
Marvel Thunder, the conjuror or “imp” as he’s called in the story, is a riff on Brer Rabbit, Glover says, “seen through a blues prism.” Thunder is also a mythical embodiment of the notion of the carrying on of the blues tradition, a standard bearer like Robert Johnson, Charley Patton and Muddy Waters in real life, men who passed the mantel to one another.
Thunder makes his music with magical abilities, curing the blind and causing all sorts of mischief for the family of blues greats with whom he becomes involved. In the story, twin children of a late blues man have inherited their father’s two guitars (made for this production by Glover’s real-life stepfather, bluesman Woody Phifer).
Marvel Thunder challenges each of the twins–a man named Jaguar and the blind woman named Glory–to what’s called a cutting contest, an actual blues tradition wherein musicians stand up and vie in an improvised, play-to-the-finish competition.
“It’s a rite of passage,” Glover says of real-life cutting contests. “When you cut with someone, especially an established great, and you’re able to hang, then you’re allowed to play professionally.” Who determines the winners of such a contest? “Oh, everybody knows who wins,” Glover laughs. “You know when you got cut.”
Replete with three onstage musicians, performing 11 songs written by Glover and blues stylist KEB’ MO’ (nee Kevin Moore), “Thunder” is Glover’s self-styled “bluesical.” The work premiered in 1996 in a co-production by the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, the Baltimore Center Stage and the Dallas Theatre Center and played at Yale Repertory Theatre in 1997. His more recent “In Walks Ed” was nominated for a 1997 Pulitzer Prize.
As for “Red Death,” the Chicago Theater Company scored quite a coup in landing the first theatrical rights to stage a Mosley novel, and the troupe is understandably excited about the project. Mosley’s writing turns our conventional notion of L.A. upside down, exploring black subculture in a time, the early ’50s, when mainstream fiction ignored it.
But his writing also offers a feast of fascinating, complex characters with musical names: Mofass, Mouse, Etta Mae, LaMarque and Poinsietta among them. The plot involves Easy’s troubles when a corrupt IRS man blackmails him into infiltrating a suspected Communist ring at a Baptist Church. “I realized I was worth a roomful of detectives,” Easy notes, “when the police decided they needed the Negro word in the ghetto.”
The company’s artistic director, Douglas Alan Mann, will return to the stage to play Mosley’s existential, reluctant sleuth, leading a cast of 12 directed by Delia Gray–an interesting choice given the story’s testosterone muscle.
“I wanted to take on a work in which I had to consider male thinking and behavior,” Gray explains. “And I wanted to bring out the exploration of male and female relationships that distinguishes Mosley from other detective writers. For some, women are merely sex objects. With Easy, the women affect what he does, and he’s driven by them.”
Mann landed the rights to the book two years ago when he met Mosley at a booksigning. The author was finishing his own screenplay for the movie version of another Rawlins tale, “Devil in a Blue Dress,” released last year by Tri-Star, but stage rights to the works remain a separate matter. The movie cast Denzel Washington as a fairly romantic Easy.
“I didn’t want to go for the matinee idol thing,” Mann says. “He is mainly someone who tries to do the best he can, dabbling in real estate at a time when there weren’t many opportunities, dragged into these other affairs by the law, mostly for trying to do others a favor. He’s a kind of pre-civil rights godfather in that L.A. neighborhood, a man filled with humanity, but a flawed man, too, as are we all.”
David Barr, in writing the adaptation, says he was attracted to Mosley’s complex view of the black experience. “Easy’s a poor guy, a smalltime businessman from the third ward of Houston, who finds some success in dilapidated real estate. Unlike the sometimes fist-fighting, gin-swilling heroes of classic noir fiction, he survives by his wits.
“Too often it seems we either have shows about hating whites or featuring jive-talking rap. We don’t often have stories of middle-class, intelligent black people determining their fate. Mosley does a brilliant job of creating characters who live in the 1940s and ’50s, part of a network of black businessmen acquiring affluence in a time when you might think there was no black fate other than lynching.”
Advance sales on “Red Death” are high, with several houses already sold out, Barr reports–unusual for this small troupe. Underlying this project and much contemporary African-American drama is a hunger for more variety in the storytelling.
“There are many, many, many sides to the black experience,” says Mann, “and I imagine a story of blacks in New Orleans in the 1950s would be very different from this one. This is an opportunity to open up and broaden our views of black life.”
“You have to challenge your audiences and provide sophisticated material instead of regurgitating the same old stuff,” Barr says. “These are real characters, not stereotypical or blacksploitation. There has to be more than `Home Boys in Outer Space.’ “
