Passing Strange and Pulpit Portrayals: Where Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Stew Intersect
The Rock & Roll musical Passing Strange begins in a Baptist church, or rather an implausible abstraction of one. From my first row center mezzanine perch Tuesday night, I leaned forward, brow furrowed as the messy scene unfolded. My best friend, with whom I grew up in the oldest Black congregation in Seattle (a satellite of the oldest Black institution in the USA) and who I was treating to her first Broadway production, pointed at lithe cast member Colman Domingo and whispered in my ear, "I don't think anyone but him has been to a Black church." I nodded and focused on cast member Rebecca Jones attempting church lady ecstasy by executing a stock west African dance move to the unimpressive and overly loud rock fracas.
Soon after, Passing Strange's sharpest actor, de' Adre Aziza, unleashed a squealing, lip-smacking Black middle class archetype of whom I have written before, the bougie broad, maligned in sociology and culture from at least as far back as E. Franklin Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie
There were highlights, namely the second half, although a pre-intermission number titled "Amsterdam" was quite good. The actors, all of color excepting the band, transplanted to Amsterdam and Berlin portrayed hyper friendly white Europeans to Breaker's bright-eyed, low-esteemed artistic Negro. There, Stew and his collaborator and ex-girlfriend Heidi Rodewald articulate better the performative requirements of communicating authentic blackness and their number, "The Black Ones," was hands-up-and-splayed-Jolson-style brilliant. Still the characterizations of his European acquaintances and lovers contrasted with those of his Black friends and family stateside, especially the women. It's as if Stew reserved all the empathy and insight for the thick accented Dutch and German strangers and the ball busting to his earnest but all too conforming mother and materialism to Aziza's rearing relaxed head. Moreover, these one-note Negroes from which would-be-expat Breaker is so isolated, are presented as representative and that's woefully misleading. I left with the impression that I had just witnessed theatre envisioned by a man with an ambivalent relationship to his own race at best, so much so that he couldn't bear to imbue us with any complexity or sufficiently intervene on his protagonist's embittered teenage impressions by musical's end.
Where Stew et al got the Black church wrong, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright in his empowered and colorful historicizing of the Black activist church and gospel traditions has got us Obama supporters worried. No lover of Obama's ballyhooed race speech, "A More Perfect Union," with significant concerns about Obama's knowledge and understanding of the African American experience and endemic racism's past and present circumscription of our lives, I had no qualms with Rev. Wright's defense of his good name and incisive, biblically-informed readings of American politics. None. But even as I listened to his well-received Bill Moyers interview, I noticed a tendency to anecdotalize and overreach: his tendentious comments on the Blues' mediation of Black suicide rates, the most immediate example. But when he stood at the National Press Club in New York and answered the frightened, frizzy haired, passively combative, call and response phobic white girl's question, with, proud Bison Que that he is, a little too much jocularity--throwing up the hooks is not appropriate at a nationally broadcast political/ecumenical press conference--I sighed. By "capisce", I was rolling my eyes and couldn't watch any further although Jay Smooth has posted the full press conference at his site.
With both Rev. Wright and Stew, there was an excess of familiarity, which bred broad-stroked messaging of the Black church's intolerance on the one hand or radical activism on the other. We are a misrepresented people, even by ourselves. Stew and Wright manufactured screw-faced, grand-hatted conservatives and a mammoth media-retaliatory Amen Choir in service of worthy messages that would have been better served by specificity and nuance.
Photo Credit: Michal Daniel captured the cast of Passing Strange at an earlier run at the Public Theater
Tags: Black, Church, Jeremiah Wright, Passing Strange, Race, Stew, Theatre
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Comments
1.
Aisha says:
Thanks for your review of the musical. As for the Obama issue, I must admit, I was very worried. Actually, I was terrified. I asked myself what did Wright have to offer the audience at the National Press Club? And even after seeing a only snippet it seems that I had every reason to worry? Why did he do it? What was his purpose? Now, I guess we might ever know the answer.
05/07/2008 at 11:33 PM