The Good Negro at The Public Theater

When the economy is down the revival flourishes on Broadway: Hair, West Side Story, South Pacific, Blithe Spirit, Guys and Dolls, Hedda Gabler, even Mamma Mia! With 9 to 5 about to go into preview, there isn't much serious theater left: August: Osage County, God of Carnage, 33 Variations, Impressionism, and reasons to be pretty.

And there is The Good Negro at The Public Theater. After years of subscribing to a variety of theater companies, some of which have been ruined by over-expansion into Broadway houses and therefore losing their edge, I find that The Public Theater maintains principles of drama, with just enough discomfort to work through the sophistication of the New York audience. There isn't much Iowa visiting at The Public.

The play is a revival from the Public's earlier Lab production. It was written by a talented and complex playwright, Tracey Scott Wilson, the first in a trilogy of historical plays. The next will be about the Black Panthers. This one is set in Birmingham, Alabama in 1962 and is a fictionalized version of the young and emerging leader Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. with all of his flaws, because what makes this play so enormously interesting is Wilson's insistence that she portray icons as people trying desperately to live up to their ideals.

It isn't Rosa Parks, the perfect Negro, to start the Birmingham bus boycott that launched Rev. King's career. Instead it is the arrest of a four year old girl and her mother for using the "whites only" bathroom in a department store when the "coloreds only" was broken. The arrest of this fine and furious woman, Claudette Sullivan, played by Joniece Abbott-Pratt, sets off an opportunity for national leadership for Rev. Jimmy Lawrence, by Curtis McClarin, and his fellow preacher Henry Evans, by J. Bernard Calloway. Both men give superb performances with all of the glitter of Southern preaching. Rev. Jimmy's long-suffering wife is played by Rachel Nicks who is so beautiful and graceful that we will be seeing her in many more plays. The community organizer, a European, college educated Negro, Bill Rutherford, by Curtis McClarin, is effete, doesn't know how to sing or pray, but brings the technical knowledge of organizing to Birmingham. One thinks of Bayard Ruskin and his role in the Birmingham bus boycott.

And then there are the two FBI agents, "the old man" aka J. Edgar Hoover and his obsession to link the Civil Rights movement to Russia and to discredit its leaders through illegal wiretaps and rumors of sexual promiscuity. There is the Klan and its infiltrator, and there is violence.

The second act is too long, it gets fragmented as it tries to resolve all of the points it wants to make, but this is a worthy play, beautifully acted, with a glimpse into the courage, fear, and frailty of those men and women who withstood fire hoses, unemployment, intimidation, and multiple arrests so that their children might be free.