This doubtless isn’t what Wilson has in mind when he speaks of the spiritual fortification and survival that black drama can provide. All the same, the audience is audibly stirred by Rashad’s peroration, crying out “Hallelujah!” and “Testify!” The subject of racism—or, for that matter, white people—simply never arises: in the all-black world depicted onstage, the risks and remedies are all much closer to hand.
That’s one puzzle. Here’s another: If theatre is dying, what do we make of these nearly three thousand black folks gathered in downtown Newark? The phenomenon I’m witnessing has nothing in common with “Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding,” say, or dinner theatre in Westchester, offering “Damn Yankees” over a steak and two veg. It’s true that black audiences have always had a predilection for talking back at performances. But more than that is going on in this theatre: the intensity of engagement is palpable. During some of the gospel numbers, there are members of the audience who stand up and do the Holy Dance by their seats. However crude the script and the production, they’re generating the kind of audience communion that most playwrights can only dream of.
In “My Grandmother Prayed for Me,” the deus ex machina is pretty literal. When Ein sets off to seek vengeance, his grandma and brother go in search of him, joined by Samantha, who—having been visited by an angel in the shape of a little boy—has seen the light. (“It was this voice, Mama, this voice from Heaven. It told me that Ein and Rashad need a good mama.”) The curtain rises on a gang-infested project. It appears that Ein, too, has seen the light and laid down his gun. “I know I haven’t had the best things in life,” he tells Slow Pimp defiantly, “but God gave me the best grandmother in the world.” Slow Pimp doesn’t take his defection well, but it’s Rashad who catches the first bullet. Next, Slow Pimp turns his gat on the meddling grandmother. She prays for divine intervention and gets it: the gun jams; Slow Pimp is struck by lightning; the angel raises Rashad from the ground. The audience goes wild.
Nobody said it was high culture, but historically this is what a lot of American theatre, particularly before the First World War, was like. Other “ghettoized” theatres, for all their vibrancy, also ignored many of the criteria for serious art—not least the Yiddish theatre, a center of immigrant Jewish life in New York at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The former Times theatre critic Frank Rich says, “What we think of as the Yiddish theatre today was essentially popular entertainment for immigrants. There were what we’d now think of as hilarious versions of, say, ‘King Lear,’ in which King Lear lives. Or there were fairy tales, about an impoverished family arriving on the Lower East Side and ending up on Riverside Drive living high on the hog.” (There was also, as he notes, an avant-garde Yiddish theatre, based largely in the Bronx, but that’s a different, and more elevated, story.)
The fact that the audience at the Sarah Vaughan Concert Hall is entirely black creates an essential dynamic. I mentioned elements of comic relief: they include a black preacher greedy for Grandma’s chicken wings; a randy old man trailing toilet paper from a split seam in the back of his pants; the grandmother herself, whose churchiness is outlandishly caricatured; endless references to Stickey’s lapses of personal hygiene. All the very worst stereotypes of the race are on display, larger than life. Here, in this racially sequestered space, a black audience laughs uninhibitedly, whereas the presence of white folks would have engendered a familiar anxiety. Will they think that’s what we’re really like? If this drama were shown on television—on any integrated forum—Jesse Jackson would probably denounce it, the N.A.A.C.P. would demand a boycott, and every soul here would swap his or her finery for sandwich boards in order to picket it. You don’t want white people to see this kind of spectacle; you want them to see the noble dramas of August Wilson, where the injuries and injustices perpetrated by the white man are never far from our consciousness. (It should be mentioned that there are far more respectable and well-groomed versions of gospel drama—most notably Vy Higgenson’s “Mama I Want to Sing” and its progeny—that have achieved a measure of crossover success, serving mainly as vehicles for some very impressive singing. But they’re better regarded as pageants, or revues, than stage plays.) By contrast, these Chitlin Circuit plays carry an invisible racial warning sticker: For domestic consumption only—export strictly prohibited.
For the creators of this theatre, there are other gratifications to be had. “I’ve never made so much money in my life as I made when I did the forty or so cities we did on the Chitlin Circuit,” James Chapmyn, one veteran of the circuit, tells me. And Chapmyn wasn’t even one of the top grossers. “The guy that did ‘Beauty Shop’ probably grossed fifteen to twenty-five million dollars in the Chitlin Circuit,” he says. “These plays make enormous money.”
Chapmyn is a blunt-featured, odd-shaped man, with a bullet head and a Buddha belly. He’s thirty-six, and he grew up in Kansas, the son of a Baptist minister. He tells me that he fell out with his father in his early twenties. “He was adamant in teaching us to stand up for who we are, and who I am happens to be a black gay man. He taught me to tell the truth,” Chapmyn says, but adds that his father changed his mind when his son came out. “I just wish you had lied,” the minister told his son. A resulting disaffection with the church—and a spell as a homeless person—impelled him to write a play for which he has become widely known: “Our Young Black Men Are Dying and Nobody Seems to Care.” His experience with the Chitlin Circuit was decidedly mixed but still memorable.
Chapmyn, like everyone else who has succeeded on the Chitlin Circuit, had to master the dark arts of marketing and promotion; and to do so while bypassing the major media. He genially explains the ground rules: “What has happened in America is that you have a very active African-American theatre audience that doesn’t get their information from the arts section in the newspaper; that doesn’t read reviews but listens to the radio, gets things stuffed in their bulletins in church, has flyers put on their car when they’re night-clubbing. That’s how people get to know about black theatre. Buying the arts section ain’t going to cut it for us. That audience is not interested in the ‘black theatre,’ and the black-theatre audience is not interested in reading that information. We use radio quite extensively, because in our community and places we’ve gone African-Americans listen to radio. In fact, there’s kind of an unspoken rule on the Chitlin Circuit: if a city doesn’t have a black radio station, then the Chitlin Circuit won’t perform there.”
But the Chitlin Circuit has a less amiable side; indeed, to judge from some of the tales you hear, many of its most dramatic events occur offstage. The inner-city version of foundation program officers are drug dealers with money to burn, and their influence is unmistakable. “They do everything in cash,” Chapmyn says. “At our highest point, I know that after we all got our money, we were still collecting in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand dollars a week. That was cash being given to us, usually in envelopes, by people we didn’t know. It was scary.” He continues, “When I was in that circuit, I dealt with a lot of people who didn’t have anything but beeper numbers, who would call me with hotel numbers, who operated through post-office boxes, who would show up at the time of the show—and most of the time take care of me and my people very well.”
Not always, though. “In one city, I think we did three shows, and the receipts after expenses were a hundred and forty thousand dollars,” Chapmyn recounts. “My percentage of that was to be sixty-five thousand dollars. I remember the people gave me five thousand and told me that if I wanted the rest I’d have to sue them.” He ended up spending the night in jail. “I was so mad I was ready to hurt somebody,” he explains. “Somebody is going to tell me that they got my sixty thousand dollars and they ain’t going to give it to me? I think I flipped a table over and hit somebody in the face.”
Larry Leon Hamlin, too, becomes animated when he talks about the sleazy world of popular theatre. “Contracts have been put out on people,” he tells me. “If you
are a big-time drug dealer, it’s like, ‘These plays are making money, and I’ve got money. I’m going to put out a play.’ That drug dealer will write a play who has never written a play before, will direct the play, who has never directed a play before. They get deep with guns.” James Chapmyn says he dropped out of the circuit because of the criminal element: “Here I am doing a play about all the things killing African-American men, chief among those things being the violence and the drugs, and I’m doing business with people who are probably using the money they make from drugs to promote my play. I had a fundamental problem with that.” Chapmyn, plainly, is a man with a mission of uplift. By contrast, many other stars of the Chitlin Circuit have the more single-minded intent of pleasing an audience: they stoop to conquer.
That might be said, certainly, of the most successful impresario of the Chitlin Circuit, a man named Shelly Garrett. Garrett maintains that his play “Beauty Shop” has been seen by more than twenty million people; that it’s the most successful black stage play in American history; and that he himself is “America’s No. 1 black theatrical producer, director, and playwright.” Shelly Garrett has never met August Wilson; August Wilson has never heard of Shelly Garrett. They are as unacquainted with each other as art and commerce are said to be. (Except for “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson,” both of which were profitable, all of August Wilson’s plays have lost money.)
Garrett is a handsome man in his early fifties, given to bright-colored sports coats and heavy gold jewelry, and there is about him the unquiet air of a gambler. He was born in Dallas, worked there as a disk jockey, and later moved to Los Angeles to begin an acting career; he didn’t make his début as a dramatist until 1986, with “Snuff and Miniskirts.” It played in the Ebony Showcase Theatre, in Los Angeles, for about six weeks. The following year, he staged “Beauty Shop.” After running on and off in Los Angeles, that show went on tour, and, as Garrett likes to say, “the rest is history.” Garrett had his audience in the palm of his hand and his formula at his fingertips; all that was left was for him to repeat it with slight variation, in plays like “Beauty Shop Part 2,” “Living Room,” “Barber Shop,” and “Laundromat.”
“It reminds you of the old commedia-dell’arte stuff,” OyamO says of Garrett’s approach to theatre. “But it’s black, and it’s today, and it’s loud.” He also makes the obvious remark that “if a white man was producing ‘Beauty Shop,’ they would be lynching it.” Still, what Shelly Garrett does has a far better claim to be “community theatre” than what we normally refer to by that name.
Garrett’s dramatis personae are as uniform as restaurant place settings: the parts invariably include a mouthy fat woman, a beautiful vamp, a sharptongued and swishy gay man, and a handsome black stud, who will ultimately be coupled with the fat woman. Much of the dialogue consists of insults and trash talk. Other options and accessories may be added, to taste; but typically there’s a striptease scene, and lots of Teddy Pendergrass on the mixing board. The gay man and the fat woman swap gibes—“play the dozens”—during lulls in the action.
Although Garrett’s plays adhere to pretty much the same institutional and narrative template, they are not dashed off. “I take so much time in rehearsals and writing these shows,” Garrett tells me. “I might rewrite a show forty times, and I take so much time with them and the rehearsals and the delivery of the lines that I just run actors crazy. I run them nuts. But then, at the end, when they get their standing ovation, they love me.” A strained chuckle: “Takes them a long time to love me, but finally they do.” Garrett prides himself on his professionalism, which lifts him far above the cheesier theatrical realm where drug-pusher auteurs and shakedown artists might freelance. And there’s something disarming about his buoyant, show-me-the-money brand of dramaturgy.
Garrett is not the product of anyone’s drama workshop; he comes from a world in which the Method refers to a birth-control technique. He has seen almost no “legitimate” theatre, even in its low-end form: “I’m embarrassed to tell people that I’ve never even seen ‘The Wiz.’ On Broadway, I’ve seen ‘Les Miz,’ ‘Cats,’ and—What was that black show that had Gregory Hines in it?” His shows play to ordinary black people—the “people on the avenue,” as Wilson wistfully puts it—and if these shows are essentially invisible to the white mainstream, so much the better. “But I have things in my show that black people can relate to,” Garrett declares. “If you’re sitting in that audience and something is happening on that stage that you can absolutely not relate to, why are you even there?”
In “Beauty Shop,” Terry (conservative, pretty) is the proprietor of the hair salon; Sylvia (sexy), Margaret (fat), and Chris (gay) are stylists; and Rachel (tall, well dressed) is a customer.
Terry: Barbara Dell! Is that man still beating on her?
Sylvia: Punching her lights out! It must have been a humdinger ’cause her glasses were real dark!
Terry: Well, if she’s stupid enough to stay there with him, she deserves it!
Rachel: I have never understood why a woman just takes that kind of stuff off of a man.
Margaret: I can’t understand a man raising his hand to hit a woman!
Chris: I guess you wouldn’t. What man would be brave enough to hit you?
Despite outrageous caricature, it doesn’t seem quite right to call these plays homophobic. The gay characters may be stereotyped, but the bigots aren’t treated charitably, either; the queen is always given the last word. “You are an embarrassment to the male gender, to the Y.M.C.A., the Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, U.S. Army, and . . . Old Spice!” a customer tells Chris in the course of a steadily escalating argument. Chris replies, “Now what you need to do is go home and have a little talk with you mother! I wasn’t always gay, I might be your daddy!” Politically correct it isn’t, but neither is it mean-spirited. At the end, the fat woman is rewarded with a desirable man. And occasionally there are even monologues with morals, in which philandering males are put in their place by right-on women.
First and foremost, though, Garrett is a businessman. His production company moves along with him; he refuses to fly, but has a bus that’s fully equipped with fax and phone. He’s known for his skill in saturating the black press and radio stations. He’s also known for the money he makes selling merchandise like T-shirts and programs. He can tell you that his average ticket price is twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents, that he rarely plays a venue with fewer than two thousand seats, that a show he did in Atlanta netted about six hundred thousand dollars a week. (For purposes of comparison, the weekly net of hit “straight” plays—like “Master Class,” “Taking Sides,” and so forth—is typically between one and two hundred thousand dollars; the weekly net of hit musicals like “Miss Saigon,” “Les Misérables,” and “Sunset Boulevard” is usually in the neighborhood of five hundred thousand.) In New York, Garrett’s “Beauty Shop” had weekly revenues of more than eight hundred thousand, and that was for an eleven-week run, during which the show sold out every week but one. Garrett remembers the time fondly: “They put me up at the Plaza in New York. First black to ever stay at the penthouse of the Plaza. And I was there for three weeks—the penthouse of the Plaza!”
To most people who both take the theatrical arts seriously and aspire to an “organic connection” with the black community, Garrett is a cultural candy man, and his plays the equivalent of caries. Woodie King, Jr., of New York’s New Federal Theatre (which has had unusual success in attracting black audiences for black theatre), expresses a widespread sentiment in the world of political theatre when he describes Garrett as “an individual going after our personal riches.” He says, “It’s not doing anything for any kind of black community. It’s not like he’s going to make money, then find five deserving women writers and put on their work. It’s always going to be about him.” It’s clear that for dramatists who view themselves as producing work for their community, but depend for their existence on foundation and government support, Garrett is an embarrassment in more ways
than one.
“Artistically, I think they’re horrible,” the Crossroads’ Ricardo Khan says of the Chitlin Circuit’s carnivalesque productions. “I don’t think the acting is good, I don’t think the direction is good, I don’t think the level of production is good. But I don’t put them down for being able to speak to something that people are feeling. I think the reason it’s working is that it’s making people laugh at themselves, making them feel good, and they’re tired of heavy stuff.” But his political consciousness rebels at the easy anodyne, the theatregoer’s opiate. His own work, he says, aspires to raise consciousness and transform society. He sounds almost discouraged when he adds, “But people don’t always want that. Sometimes they just want to have fun.”
Nobody wants to see the Chitlin Circuit and the Crossroads converge. But there’s something heartening about the spectacle of black drama that pays its own way—even if aficionados of serious theatre find something disheartening about the nature of that drama. So maybe we shouldn’t worry so much about those Du Boisian yardsticks of blackness. That way lies heartbreak, or confusion. Wilson and his supporters, to listen to them, would divvy up American culture along the color line, sorting out possessions like an amicably divorcing couple. But, as I insist, Wilson’s polemics disserve his poetics.
Indeed, his work is a tribute to a hybrid vigor, as an amalgam of black vernacular, American naturalism, and high modernist influences. (In the history of black drama, perhaps only Baraka’s 1964 play “Dutchman” represents as formidable an achievement, and that was explicitly a drama of interracial conflict. By contrast, one of Wilson’s accomplishments is to register the ambiguous presence of white folks in a segregated black world—the way you see them nowhere and feel them everywhere.) There’s no contradiction in the fact that Wilson revels in the black cadences of the barbershop and the barbecue, on the one hand, and pledges fealty to Aristotle’s Poetics, on the other. Wilson may talk about cultural autarky, but, to his credit, he doesn’t practice it. Inevitably, the audience for serious plays in this mostly white country is mostly white. Wilson writes serious plays. His audience is mostly white. What’s to apologize for?
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 73