Review - The Good Negro: I Know Where I've Been

If the gang at Madison Avenue were looking for the perfect spokesmodel to help win support for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, they couldn't have done better than Rosa Parks, a sweet-looking, modestly dressed woman who spoke with quiet dignity. Or Ezell Blair, Jr., David Richmond, Joseph McNeil and Franklin McCain, the conservatively dressed, well groomed college freshmen who started the Woolworth lunch counter sit-in. White people who feared the consequences of desegregating America could have their views softened with a look at these clean-cut "credits to their race" (as the old saying went) who were everyday people just like them. And if that sounds like a crass way of referring to the brave souls who put themselves on the front lines in the fight for equality, well that's a major point playwright Tracy Scott Wilson makes with her new drama, The Good Negro.

First presented by The Public Theater's LAB and now getting a swift, engrossing and, when appropriate, humorous mounting by director Liesl Tommy at the Public's LuEsther Hall, The Good Negro is an ambitious attempt to show the leaders of the civil rights movement as everyday human beings with normal flaws; perhaps making what they accomplished a greater achievement than if it were done by the demi-gods some would make them out to be.

With arena seating allowing most of the audience to look down on the action, set designer Clint Ramos takes advantage of the hall's deep playing space by providing a long hardwood platform and only sparse scene-setting pieces (Lap Chi Chu's lighting takes care of the rest) allowing for two or three locations to be easily observed at the same time. Sometimes actors are right next to each other but their characters are in a different place. Tommy introduces this story-telling technique right when the play commences, as Rev. James Lawrence (Curtis McClarin in a role highly suggestive of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.) tries to inspire his weary Birmingham congregation members who are fed up with using non-violence when confronted with water hoses and attack dogs and are "tired of loving in the face of hate."

As he speaks, we also see a scene where a young black woman, Claudette (Joneice Abbott-Pratt), is beaten and arrested for taking her four-year-old daughter to use a whites only rest room because the one marked "colored" was out of service. The non-threatening image of a pretty young mother and her child is seen by James to be a perfect media symbol around which to center a boycott of segregated stores. He just needs to keep her uneducated, heavily-accented husband Pelzie (Francois Battiste) away from the press. His associates - the streetwise activist, Henry (J. Bernard Calloway) and the button-down, European-educated Rutherford (LeRoy McClain) - bicker about the best methods of non-violent confrontation, not knowing that every word they say is being recorded by a pair of FBI agents (Quincy Dunn Baker and Brian Wallace). The Feds have also recruited the help of thickheaded racist rabble-rouser, Rowe (Erik Jensen) to feed them inside information from the Ku Klux Klan. (In one scene Rowe describes how he led what he figured to be an easy attack on non-violent black marchers, only to discover that the black people watching the march were not non-violent.)

While the play does stumble a bit during some overwritten scenes and repeated points that stretch the piece into two hours and forty-five minutes (including one intermission), Wilson also delivers some excellent moments that pull you into the story and allow the actors to respond with excellent work of their own. Curtis McClarin performs Rev. Lawrence's sermons with rolling vocal cadences and the ferocity of a man possessed by a higher power. As his wife, Corinne, Rachel Nicks hits the right chords of defiant heartbreak when an audio tape of her husband threatens both the cause and their marriage. Francois Battiste's Pelzie is a beautifully realized portrait of a simple, empathetic man who sees his world crumble around him for a cause when all he wants is to be left alone.

With a very strong acting ensemble, fluid staging and passages of positively gripping writing, The Good Negro is well worth the bumps.

Photos by Joan Marcus: Top: Rachel Nicks and Curtis McClarin; Bottom: Francois Battiste and Joniece Abbott-Pratt