To work at all, a play such as “King of Coons,” loosely based on the actor known as Stepin Fetchit, must be several different kinds of painful. It must traffick in the most egregious screen stereotypes. The off-screen humiliations endured by Fetchit (real name: Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry), here known as “Cotton Pickit,” shouldn’t be any less vivid.
Playwright Michael Henry Brown’s 1993 drama draws on Fetchit’s life and screen persona. As the persona took over the man, Brown contends, self-destruction fed on an increasingly thwarted movie career. The moviemakers wanted only one thing from Fetchit: His finely honed characterization, based on a million “Zip Coon” caricatures, of the spineless, servile, molasses-paced no-account.
The paradox, as with so many other African-American performers, involved a little something known as talent. Stuck with material that was patronizing at best, viciously cruel at worse, Fetchit didn’t so much transcend his surroundings as create a universe of comic wiles within the camera frame.
“King of Coons” isn’t the play to do him justice. But the Congo Square Theatre Company production, staged by the excellent actor Harry Lennix (who doesn’t perform here), pulls what it can from Brown’s standard-issue biography.
Moment to moment, featuring an often compelling performance from Anthony Irons as Pickit, the show hits hard and hurts in the right way. Irons is best in the scenes where something more, and less, than slapstick clowning and offstage high spirits are required. When the rail-thin, hard-working performer blends his tones — bitterness with heartiness, regret with drive — we see a more complicated individual on stage. Too often, despite Lennix’s solid direction, Irons and his cohorts deal in primary colors and broad strokes.
The script is littered with platitudes masquerading as dialogue. Defending his first big movie success, Pickit says: “It shows our humor, but it shows our humanity.” Later, Pickit’s stalwart, long-suffering wife, played by Eva Loseth, entreats Pickit to “enjoy this moment, dear heart,” as if performing in a Viennese operetta. Rarely do we hear the real rhythms and tensions of lives being lived.
Brown avoids falling into the trap of hagiography. Pickit is depicted as a womanizing, self-obsessed mixed blessing of a man. You don’t sense a writer having it in for his subject. Such was the argument articulated by some when George C. Wolfe wrote the Jelly Roll Morton musical “Jelly’s Last Jam.” Not by me, though: On Broadway, with the original cast, Wolfe’s exploration of a thwarted, self-loathing, monumentally talented artist proved you can hit two or three emotional notes simultaneously, deal with something as thorny as black-on-black prejudice, and create a beautiful, complex result.
“King of Coons,” is not so complex. Someday, someone’s going to write a terrific and disturbing play about a performer such as Stepin Fetchit or Bert Williams or Josephine Baker or another major, paradoxical African-American entertainer, at odds with an America that allowed them only so much humanity in the spotlight.
“King of Coons”
When: Through March 7
Where: Congo Square Theatre Company at Theater Building Chicago, 1225 W. Belmont Ave.
Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes
Tickets: $25 at 773-327-5252
