TT: They, too, sing America

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two important shows about different aspects of the black experience in America, the world premiere of John Guare’s A Free Man of Color and the Arizona Theatre Company’s revival of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Here’s an excerpt.
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To call a play “sprawling” is not necessarily a bad thing. Some canvases are naturally larger than others, and critics who (like me) have a built-in bias in favor of careful craftsmanship must always be on guard lest it cause them to underrate a work of genius whose corners aren’t tucked in. If neatness is what you expect from John Guare’s “A Free Man of Color,” you’ll be doomed to disappointment. Mr. Guare’s ambitious new play, which tells the fantastic tale of Jacques Cornet (Jeffrey Wright), a 19th-century millionaire playboy from New Orleans who happens to be black, has a cast of 33 and runs for two and a half crowded hours. Yes, it sprawls, but for all its hectic messiness, “A Free Man of Color” is one of the three or four most stirring new plays I’ve seen since I started writing this column seven years ago.
Set in 1801, just before the Louisiana Purchase brought New Orleans under the thumb of Washington, “A Free Man of Color” starts out as a bawdy Restoration-style comedy of bad manners in which the Big Easy is portrayed as a prelapsarian Eden to whose richer citizens the concept of racial prejudice is as alien as the shadow of sexual guilt. Even though he’s black, Jacques Cornet is well-heeled enough to have slaves of his own, and the fact that he is so wealthy and attractive (Mr. Guare describes him as “a dazzling piece of work”) insulates him from the common plight of his fellow blacks. The first act, in which his sexual misadventures are catalogued in frenzied detail, plays like a 10-door farce salted with so many laughs that you won’t have time to catch your breath.
In the second act, history catches up with Monsieur Cornet. No sooner does Thomas Jefferson (John McMartin) approve the purchase of the Louisiana Territory than his status as a “free man of color” is revoked, and New Orleans’ gaudiest peacock is shorn of his feathers and sold into slavery, a terrible denouement described by Mr. Guare in language that approaches the condition of poetry…
The Arizona Theatre Company, whose shows are seen in Phoenix and Tucson, is currently doing “Ma Rainey” as well as I can imagine it being done. The staging is by Lou Bellamy, the artistic director of St. Paul’s Penumbra Theatre Company, whose magnificent Off-Broadway revival of Wilson’s “Two Trains Running” was one of the highlights of the 2006-07 season. Like that well-remembered production, it is earthily direct, wholly to the point and impeccably cast, with Jevetta Steele hitting the center of the bull’s-eye as the bisexual blues shouter whose sidemen are at murderous odds with one another. Vicki Smith’s three-level recording-studio set is a model of smell-the-coffee realism….
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Read the whole thing here.