Race is “an explosive subject”, says a theatre director to actors limbering up for a “coloured show” on Broadway. But Al Manners is hoping to make this subject less “antagonising” for a New York audience of 1955, whatever the cost to his black actors.
So the rehearsal room becomes a battleground in Alice Childress’s play, as some submit to playing mammies, servants and lynched victims, while others – namely the veteran actor Wiletta (Tanya Moodie) – rises up to challenge Manners (Rory Keenan) after a lifetime of quiet compliance.
Childress’s play was staged off-Broadway in the same year it is set, just as America was tipping into the civil rights movement, and she captured the very live anger of her era, as it was being experienced.
This backstage microcosm paints a picture of a nation still acclimatising to the push and pull of racial integration. Its four black characters, Wiletta, John (Daniel Adeosun), Millie (Naana Agyei-Ampadu) and Sheldon (Cyril Nri), are actors struggling to survive in an industry filled with overt racial prejudice, and they remind each other to smile, nod and act out the reductive roles assigned to them without complaint at the start. It is ironic, then, that real-life Broadway producers withdrew the play from its scheduled premiere in 1957 because the dramatist refused to make it more palatable for its producers.
Under Nancy Medina’s dynamic direction in a preview performance of the show, the tension is still felt now, especially between Wiletta and the pompous Manners, who disguises his micro-aggressions towards her with shallow flattery and flirtation. In other moments, the friction feels a little diluted, and without quite enough of a sting, perhaps because of our distance from this time or maybe because the play demands a tricky braiding of anger and satire.
This satire comes mainly through the play being rehearsed on Rajha Shakiry’s shabby, half-covered stage within a stage. That play is set in the deep south and fixes all the black actors to outrageously caricatured parts: Sheldon is a father who does nothing but whittle on a rocking chair; Millie is a servant in a cotton dress whose lines consists of short exclamations such as “Lord have mercy”; Wiletta is a mother who effectively sends her son to his lynching.
Some satire is built around the white characters in the rehearsal room, especially the bright-eyed Yale graduate Judy (Emma Canning), who is quick to perform white guilt but reveals an offensive naivety – in one hectoring moment she tells fellow black actors to “never have limitations on your horizon”.
Wiletta’s stand does not spark concession or guilt in Manners but a chilling rage. “People think it’s wonderful to be white,” he barks, with a list of all he has had to contend with in his career. The drama – and anger – builds promisingly but an explosive denouement never comes. The closing moments are instead rather too oblique. “Tomorrow is another day,” says Millie, and it sounds like a play on Scarlett O’Hara’s sentiment in Gone With the Wind.
It is intriguing to watch a cast of actors who are themselves playing actors but it sometimes appears too flamboyant and actorly, their comic exaggerations undercutting rather than compounding the tension.
The play’s quieter questions around representation are where its real power lies. There is a discussion about language and whether it is ever legitimate to speak a racial slur on stage – from the mouth of a racist character – or if its utterance is always gratuitous and offensive.
There is an especially interesting argument between the actors about whether being compliant – an “Uncle Tom” as Wiletta calls it – is the only way to exist in the industry or to protest against its prejudices. Rather than presenting this as a simple binary argument, Childress’s script shows the personal cost of protest and also the financial necessity of “Tom-ing”. As Sheldon says, he needs this job to pay his bills and cannot afford to protest. And while typecasting in theatre may not be as glaring today, Childress’s themes do not feel nearly as distant as they should.
At the Dorfman theatre, National Theatre, until 29 January.
