Tag Archives: A Raisin in the Sun

AIN’T NO MO’

Jordan E. Cooper has a lot to say about Ain’t No Mo’ at the Belasco (photo © Joan Marcus)

AIN’T NO MO’
Belasco Theatre
111 West 44th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through December 18, $58 – $318
aintnomobway.com

At the end of the uproarious curtain call at the December 11 matinee of Ain’t No Mo’ at the Belasco, playwright and actor Jordan E. Cooper grabbed a microphone and gave a short speech about “turning the tide” and “changing Broadway,” announcing to the crowd, in case they hadn’t already heard, that the show was closing early, on December 18, after a mere twenty-two previews and twenty-one performances. The news was so sudden and unexpected, following very positive opening reviews, that as of Monday morning, December 13, Telecharge was still selling seats through February 26.

Cooper plays African American Airlines flight attendant Peaches, a boisterously dressed character trying to make sure that every Black person makes it onto the last plane out of the United States, which has offered free one-way reparation flights back to Africa (from gate 1619) to get rid of all the Black people in the country. Peaches tells someone over the phone, “Well, bitch, I don’t know what to tell you ’cause if you stay here, you only got two choices for guaranteed housing and that’s either a cell or a coffin. After this flight, there will be no more Black folk left in this country, and I know ya’ll don’t wanna be the only ones left behind because them muthafuckas will try to put you in a museum or make you do watermelon shows at SeaWorld and shit. Hurry up or I will give your seat to some of the Latinos on stand-by.”

At the curtain call, the twenty-seven-year-old Cooper, the youngest Black American playwright to have a show on Broadway (a designation previously held by Lorraine Hansberry, who was twenty-nine when A Raisin in the Sun opened at the Ethel Barrymore in March 1959 before traveling to the very same Belasco that October), called for the audience to spread the word about Ain’t No Mo’, by mouth and social media. “We won’t go down without a fight,” he declared, also referencing the early closing notice of the Korean musical KPOP, which was playing its final performance that afternoon.

Pastor Freeman and his flock look toward a supposedly bright future in Ain’t No Mo’ (photo © Joan Marcus)

The response to the Ain’t No Mo’ closing notice has been swift (notably, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith bought out a performance, and the line to get in wrapped around Forty-Fifth St. at the matinee I attended), echoing the movement this past May to keep for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf running at the Booth after it announced it was closing three months early. The effort earned the show an additional two weeks but no more. While I had raved about the off-Broadway versions of KPOP and for colored girls, I was not a fan of either Broadway iteration, each of which had been changed dramatically, in my opinion not for the better.

Still, these voices need to be heard and these bodies seen, on and off Broadway. In an open letter on Instagram, Cooper wrote, “Ain’t No Mo’ needs your help! Now they’ve posted an eviction notice, we ‘must close’ December 18. But thank God Black people are immune to eviction notices. The Wiz got one on opening night in 1974, but audiences turned that around and it ended up running for four years. . . . We need all hands on deck with urgency. In the name of art, in the name of resistance, in the name of we belong here too, in the name of every storytelling ancestor who ever graced a Broadway stage or was told they never could, please support this production and buy a ticket and come have church with us. Radical Black work belongs on Broadway too.”

https://twitter.com/JordanECooper_/status/1602144592081879040?s=20

Ain’t No Mo’ has been tweaked since its 2019 debut at the Public, with the same wonderful cast and only minor changes to its zany yet poignant narrative, which is divided into interrelated sketches taking place at the aforementioned gate 1619; a funeral service for the dear departed Brother Righttocomplain’ in 2008 upon the election of the first American Black president, Barack Obama; an abortion clinic where millions of Black women are terrified of bringing a son into this dangerous racist world; a television gossip show in which a white woman is transitioning to Black; and a mansion where a wealthy Black family discovers their late patriarch has been keeping a secret in the basement.

Munching on Scott Pask’s imaginatively playful sets are Cooper, Fedna Jacquet, Marchánt Davis (I saw understudy Michael Rishawn in his Broadway debut), Shannon Matesky, Ebony Marshall-Oliver, and Crystal Lucas-Perry, in hysterical and, in one case, terrifying costumes by Emilio Sosa and fab wigs by Mia M. Neal. I wrote about the Public original, and it applies to the Broadway iteration as well (both of which were directed by Stevie Walker-Webb, now making his Broadway debut): “Cooper gets right to the point when a woman at the clinic tells a reporter, ‘The problem is we’re racing against a people who have never had to compete, and people who have never had to compete are fearful of competition and they will annihilate any being that challenges their birth-given promise of a victory.’ As wildly funny, if occasionally over the top and too scattershot, Ain’t No Mo’ can be, it’s also a bitter pill to swallow.”

Since coming out of the pandemic lockdown, there has been an encouraging increase in the number of Broadway shows by BIPOC creators about the Black experience, including Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s Lackawanna Blues, Death of a Salesman, The Piano Lesson, Chicken & Biscuits, Thoughts of a Colored Man, Trouble in Mind, Pass Over, Clyde’s, and Caroline, Or Change, all of which had limited runs. That progress needs to continue apace, with plays running longer.

The hootin’ and hollerin’ on- and offstage is coming to an end at the Belasco (photo © Joan Marcus)

At one point in Cooper’s show, Pastor Freeman proclaims, “Aint no mo’ blueish red light in the rearview mirror when you taking your family to the church picnic and all you got in yo’ trunk is three Dollar Store aluminum pans of sister Threadgill’s chitlins, cornbread, and collard greens. Ain’t no mo’ waiting for FEMA while the Louisiana sun is stabbing at yo’ back on the interstate and your grandmama is backstroking in a river of expired bodies. Ain’t no mo’ massa’ tiptoein’ in yo’ mama’s room to rock the shack into the midnight hour. Aint no mo’ shotdown dreams with its blood soaking the concrete outside room 306. Ain’t no mo’ Riots. Ain’t no mo’ Rosewood. Ain’t no mo’ Jasper, ain’t no mo’ Jiggin’, ain’t no mo’ Shufflin’, ain’t no mo’ Shuckin’, ain’t no mo’ Amos, ain’t no mo’ Andy, ain’t no mo’ Emmett Till, ain’t no mo’ Rodney King, ain’t no mo’ Jena 6, ain’t no mo’ Stop, ain’t no mo’ Frisk. Ain’t no mo’ getting followed around by the tall white lady in the Kmart on Jones Street. There ain’t no mo double locking they car when you walk by, they thinking you gonna hot wire they car and drive it out the parking lot, when they know they just saw you pulling up in a car they can’t even afford. That’s all over . . . that’s all done.”

Sadly, you can add to that list “ain’t no mo’ Ain’t No Mo’,” which isn’t good news for anyone.

A RAISIN IN THE SUN

Ruth (Mandi Masden) and Lena (Tonya Pinkins) look on as Travis (Toussaint Battiste) is filled with hope in Public revival of A Raisin in the Sun (photo by Joan Marcus)

A RAISIN IN THE SUN
Newman Theater, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
Through November 20, $80
publictheater.org

Tonya Pinkins rules the roost as Lena Younger in Robert O’Hara’s uneven adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s American classic, A Raisin in the Sun, continuing at the Public’s Newman Theater through November 20. Lena is the matriarch of the Younger family, who live in a cramped, paint-peeling, walls-cracking apartment on Chicago’s South Side. It’s the early 1950s, and she is waiting for a ten-thousand-dollar check to arrive, insurance money from the recent death of her husband (Calvin Dutton). Her thirty-five-year-old ne’er-do-well son, Walter Lee (Francois Battiste), is a chauffeur for a wealthy white man and dreams of using the money to put a down payment on a liquor store with his unreliable friends Bobo (Dutton) and Willy.

Walter Lee’s wife, Ruth (Mandi Masden), is doing her best to try to keep everything together, managing the finances as she and her husband raise their ten-year-old son, Travis (Toussaint Battiste or Camden McKinnon), who sleeps on the couch in the middle of the apartment. Lena’s twenty-year-old daughter, Beneatha (Paige Gilbert), shares a bedroom with her mother and is hoping to go to medical school; Beneatha has two suitors, the rich but dull George Murchison (Mister Fitzgerald) and Joseph Asagai (John Clay III), a university student from Nigeria who Beneatha believes can help connect her to her African roots. Every morning the Younger clan wakes up and hustles off to the bathroom, which is down the hall, used by all of the floor’s tenants.

When Lena buys a house in the white neighborhood of Clybourne Park, Walter Lee feels betrayed. The plot gets more complicated when Karl Lindner (Jesse Pennington), from the Clybourne Park Improvement Association, arrives to attempt to convince the Youngers not to move there, barely disguising his racism with pointed threats. (Lindner also appears in Bruce Norris’s Pulitzer Prize winner Clybourne Park, which examines things from the opposing point of view, as the association decides how to discourage a Black family from moving in.)

But Lena is determined to raise her family’s station in life, having earlier told Ruth in one of the play’s most poignant moments: “‘Rat trap’ – Yes, that’s all it is. I remember just as well the day me and Big Walter moved in here though. Hadn’t been married but two weeks and wasn’t planning on living here no more than a year. We was going to set away, little by little, don’t you know, and buy a little place out in Morgan Park. We even picked out the house. Looks right dumpy today. But Lord, child, you should know all the dreams I had ’bout buying that house and fixing it up and making me a little garden in the back. And didn’t none of it happen.” The play’s focus on real estate seems sadly prescient considering the ongoing issue of housing in the US, an issue that’s never been resolved and has exploded into a full-blown crisis in recent years.

Walter Lee (Francois Battiste) has something to say to his wife, Ruth (Mandi Masden), in new version of Lorraine Hansberry classic (photo by Joan Marcus)

Tony winner Pinkins (Caroline, or Change; Red Pill) commands the audience’s attention with a dazzling presence as she and O’Hara make Lena the central character in a role previously portrayed by such actors as Claudia McNeil, Juanita Moore, Esther Rolle, Phylicia Rashad, and LaTanya Richardson Jackson. The focus of A Raisin in the Sun is usually on Walter, who has been played by Sidney Poitier, Earle Hyman, Danny Glover, Sean Combs, and Denzel Washington; Washington, for example, dominated in Kenny Leon’s 2014 Broadway revival, but Battiste’s Walter is not as imposing, though it is touching that his real-life son alternates as Travis. Gilbert (School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play, The Rose Tattoo) gives Beneatha an underlying strength, representing the future of Black America, while Masden (Saint Joan, Our Lady of Kibeho) is affecting as a realistic woman who can’t find the time for her own dreams. “Honey, you never say nothing new,” she tells Walter Lee. “I listen to you every day, every night and every morning, and you never say nothing new. So you would rather be Mr. Arnold than be his chauffeur. So – I would rather be living in Buckingham Palace.”

Clint Ramos’s set, Karen Perry’s costumes, Alex Jainchill’s lighting, and Elisheba Ittoop’s sound are effective, setting the right mood for Hansberry’s powerful commentary on race, class, and housing in America, which is as relevant as ever more than sixty years after its debut. Unfortunately, O’Hara fiddles around too much to put his mark on the production, as he has done recently with revivals of Long Day’s Journey into Night, a streamlined version set in the Covid era, and Richard III at the Delacorte, with Danai Gurira as the conniving title character.

O’Hara has much more success with new plays, including Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play, Gurira’s Eclipsed and The Continuum, and his own Bootycandy. His 2010 play The Etiquette of Vigilance imagines where the Younger family is fifty years after Raisin.

Karl Lindner (Jesse Pennington) tries to talk the Younger family out of moving to his white neighborhood (photo by Joan Marcus)

Perri Gaffney injects a burst of energy as the gossipy Mrs. Johnson, but there’s a reason why that scene is usually cut, as it feels out of place and unnecessary. The occasional presence of Lena’s husband’s ghost seeps into melodrama, while a key speech by Walter Lee near the end of the play shatters the fourth wall as it accuses the (mostly white) audience directly of its complicity in his situation.

When Raisin (the title comes from the Langston Hughes poem “A Dream Deferred,” in which the Harlem Renaissance writer and activist asks, “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun? / Or fester like a sore — / And then run?”) began its run at the Newman, the Public was also presenting Elevator Repair Service’s Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge at the Anspacher, complete with a coda that also broke the fourth wall and involved Baldwin (Greig Sargeant) and his good friend Hansberry (Daphne Gaines). It’s possible to try too hard with classic material; it’s better to trust the play more even while adding your imprimatur.

THE METHOD ON FILM: WANDA / FIVE EASY PIECES

BAM series kicks off with a double feature with Method man Marlon Brando

THE METHOD ON FILM
BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Series runs July 22-28
www.bam.org

“Acting is a curious thing,” Isaac Butler writes in The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act. “Practically anyone who watches Hollywood movies — which is to say pretty much everyone — spends a staggering amount of talking and thinking about actors. We know intimate details of their private lives. We look to them to speak out about the issues of the day. We evaluate them constantly and festoon the better ones with a trunkload of different prizes. Yet when pressed to explain what good acting actually is, we usually struggle.”

BAM provides plenty for cineastes to struggle over with the one-week series “The Method on Film,” featuring works starring some of the greatest movie actors ever, famous for their discipline and dedication to their craft. It all begins with a double feature with Method man Marlon Brando, playing Stanley Kowalski in Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire, then being profiled in the 1966 documentary Meet Marlon Brando. Butler will be at BAM for a prescreening reading and postscreening book signing.

The series continues with Montgomery Clift, Sidney Poitier, Eartha Kitt, Warren Beatty, John Garfield, Kim Stanley, Jack Nicholson, Joanne Woodward, Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, and Rod Steiger in such classics as The Pawnbroker, The Graduate, A Raisin in the Sun, and Humoresque in addition to a handful of lesser-known works, including two early, influential Russian silent versions of The Queen of Spades. There will also be discussions before the screenings of Arnold Laven’s Anna Lucasta (with dramaturg, director, and archivist Arminda Thomas on July 23) and Edgar G. Ulmer’s American Matchmaker (with Columbia Yiddish professor Jeremy Dauber on July 24). Below is a deeper look at two of the highlights, a pair of unique road movies.

Barbara Loden wrote, directed, produced, and stars in Wanda

WANDA (Barbara Loden, 1970)
Tuesday, July 26, 9:30
www.bam.org

“If you don’t want anything, you won’t have anything, and if you don’t have anything, then you’re as good as dead,” Mr. Dennis (Michael Higgins) tells Wanda Goronski (Barbara Loden) in Wanda. The first theatrical feature written, directed, produced by, and starring an American woman, Wanda, named Best Foreign Film at the Venice International Film Festival, is a raw, naturalistic road-trip movie about an emotionally vacant woman who walks through life in a kind of stupor, wandering into situations to avoid being alone yet still trapped in an unrelenting alienation. Loden, who won a 1964 Tony for her portrayal of Maggie in Arthur Miller’s After the Fall — the play was directed on Broadway by Elia Kazan, whom she would marry four years later and remain with through her tragic death in 1980 — doesn’t try to turn Wanda into a feminist antihero, but she does take all the power away from her, making her completely dependent on other people, primarily men, an excellent counterpoint to Loden herself, who has all the power. Staying on her sister’s (Dorothy Shupenes) couch in the middle of Pennsylvania coal country, Wanda is almost zombielike as she slowly heads to court in curlers and a housecoat and lets the judge award custody of her two children to her soon-to-be-ex-husband (Jerome Thier). “I’m just no good,” she mumbles. Broke and apparently with no faith or hope in her future, she proceeds to get involved with some sketchy losers, including Mr. Dennis, who takes her on a minor crime spree that is a far cry from Bonnie and Clyde. All along the way, she rarely has anything of any interest to say to anyone; the only time she speaks clearly and definitively is when she explains that she likes onions on her hamburgers.

Shot in a cinéma vérité style by documentary cinematographer Nicholas T. Proferes, Wanda is a riveting and infuriating exploration of the death of the American dream as the 1960s come to an end and the country reexamines itself, not necessarily liking what it sees. Apathy competes with melancholy as Wanda is unable and unwilling to take control of her life, dressed in the same white outfit and carrying the same white pocketbook throughout nearly the entire film, but she is more disconsolate than angelic. Much of the film is improvised and most of the characters are portrayed by nonprofessional actors or people who just happened to be in the area, like the scene in which Mr. Dennis and Wanda encounter a family flying a remote-control model airplane. (Higgins would go on to make more than fifty films, including The Conversation, The Stepford Wives, and The Seduction of Joe Tynan.) Coming on the cusp of the women’s liberation movement, Wanda is about a pouty sad-sack who barely ever changes emotion, always wearing the same blank stare. It’s not that she’s promiscuous, adventurous, or even unpredictable; she just is. You desperately want her to take action, to care about something or someone, but it’s just not going to happen. It’s almost as if Loden is setting the groundwork for such future films as Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver, which feature such strong, decisive female characters as Alice (Ellen Burstyn) in the former and Iris (Jodie Foster) in the latter, who at least attempt to take matters into their own hands; elements of Wanda can also be found in Aki Kaurismäki’s Match Factory Girl and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Wanda would end up being Loden’s only film as writer and director; she died in 1980 of cancer at the age of forty-eight.

Jack Nicholson places the most famous sandwich order in film history (Sony Pictures Repertory)

FIVE EASY PIECES (Bob Rafelson, 1970)
Tuesday, July 26, 7:00
www.bam.org

A key film that helped lead 1960s cinema into the grittier 1970s, Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces is one of the most American of dramas, a tale of ennui and unrest among the rich and the poor, a road movie that travels from trailer parks to fashionable country estates. Caught in between is Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson), a former piano prodigy now working on an oil rig and living with a well-meaning but not very bright waitress, Rayette (Karen Black). When Bobby finds out that his father is ill, he reluctantly returns to the family home, the prodigal son who had left all that behind, escaping to a less-complicated though unsatisfying life putting his fingers in a bowling ball rather than tickling the keys of a grand piano. Back in his old house, he has to deal with his brother, Carl (Ralph Waite), a onetime violinist who can no longer play because of an injured neck and who serves as the film’s comic relief; Carl’s wife, Catherine (Susan Anspach), a snooty woman Bobby has always been attracted to; and Bobby’s sister, Partita (Lois Smith), a lonely, troubled soul who has the hots for Spicer (John Ryan), the live-in nurse who takes care of their wheelchair-bound father (William Challee).

Rafelson had previously directed the psychedelic movie Head (he cocreated the Monkees band and TV show) and would go on to make such films as The King of Marvin Gardens, Stay Hungry, and Black Widow; written by Carole Eastman, Five Easy Pieces fits flawlessly in between them, a deeply philosophical work that captures the myriad changes the country was experiencing as the Woodstock Generation was forced to start growing up. The film suffers from some unsteady editing primarily in the earlier scenes, but it is still a gem, featuring at least two unforgettable scenes, one that takes place in a California highway traffic jam and the other in a diner, where Bobby places an order for the ages. And as good as both Nicholson, who earned the first of seven Best Actor Oscar nominations, and Black, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, are, Helena Kallianiotes nearly steals the picture as a crazy woman railing against the ills of the world from the backseat of Bobby’s car.

A RAISIN IN THE SUN

Walter Lee Younger (Denzel Washington) and Ruth (Sophie Okonedo) are just trying to survive day to day in stellar revival of A RAISIN IN THE SUN (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Ethel Barrymore Theatre
243 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 15, $67 – $149
www.raisinbroadway.com

Broadway revivals are often about star power, still-relevant socioeconomic or –political issues, or inventive staging of a familiar classic. But Kenny Leon’s new version of A Raisin in the Sun goes back to the very creation of this fifty-five-year-old American drama, celebrating its fascinating author, Lorraine Hansberry. As patrons enter the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, an interview with Hansberry, the first African American woman to have a work produced on Broadway, is being broadcast on the sound system. Each Playbill comes with an additional pamphlet that reprints “Sweet Lorraine,” James Baldwin’s 1969 Esquire remembrance of Hansberry — who died in 1965 at the age of thirty-four — in which he writes, “Black people ignored the theater because the theater had always ignored them. But, in Raisin, black people recognized that house and all the people in it — the mother, the son, the daughter, and the daughter-in-law — and supplied the play with an interpretative element which could not be present in the minds of white people: a kind of claustrophobic terror, created not only by their knowledge of the streets.” Leon’s production, and the extremely talented cast, honors every word of the play, which doesn’t feel old-fashioned in any way.

Walter Lee Younger (Denzel Washington) explains his questionable plans to his mother (LaTanya Richardson Jackson) in A RAISIN IN THE SUN (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Oscar and Tony winner Denzel Washington stars as Walter Lee Younger, a dreamer trying to lift his family out of poverty in their cramped apartment on Chicago’s South Side. Every morning there’s a battle to get to the bathroom across the hall, shared by everyone on the floor. Walter’s mother, Lena (LaTanya Richardson Jackson), is expecting a $10,000 insurance check for her recently deceased husband. While Walter wants to invest it in a liquor store with his friends Bobo (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and the never-seen Willy Harris, Walter’s hardworking wife, Ruth (Sophie Okonedo), wants to put it to far more practical use. Also awaiting the money are Walter and Ruth’s son, Travis (Bryce Clyde Jenkins), who sleeps on the couch, and Walter’s sister, Beneatha (Anika Noni Rose), who lives with them as well and wants to become a doctor. As Beneatha spends time with two different men, the assimilating George Murchison (Jason Dirden) and Joseph Asagai (Sean Patrick Thomas), who introduces her to her African roots, Lena considers moving the family to all-white Clybourne Park, leading to a visit by neighborhood leader Karl Lindner (David Cromer), setting in motion a series of events that, with a delicate balance of humor and tragedy, intelligently capture the black experience in mid-twentieth-century America. (A Raisin in the Sun was a direct influence on Bruce Norris’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Clybourne Park.)

A representative from Clybourne Park (Karl Lindner) has some surprising news for the Younger family (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Washington (Fences, Julius Caesar), in a role created by Sidney Poitier first onstage and then in the 1961 film, is a whirlwind as Walter, practically dancing as he weaves his way through Mark Thompson’s apartment set, his gait displaying a slight jump, his leg often shaking in anticipation of making things better for him and his family. Okonedo embodies the sadness of the everyday drudgery her life encompasses, her eyes tired before their time, heavy with what could have been. Jackson is a fireball as the caring matriarch who wants to see her children and grandson succeed. Hansberry’s words flow like poetry as the Youngers’ path is continually blocked, evoking the Langston Hughes poem that gave the work its title, “A Dream Deferred”: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun? / Or fester like a sore — / And then run?” It was only ten years ago that Leon brought A Raisin in the Sun to the Royale, with a cast that included Sean Combs, Audra McDonald, Phylicia Rashad, and Sanaa Lathan, but this stellar current production makes the previous one but a distant memory, injecting fresh new life into one of Broadway’s most historically and socially important works.

A TIME FOR BURNING — CINEMA OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT: THE INTRUDER / NINE FROM LITTLE ROCK

William Shatner plays shady character Adam Cramer in powerful film about school integration in a southern town

THE INTRUDER (Roger Corman, 1962)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Tuesday, August 20, 9:30
Series continues through August 28
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Exploitation master Roger Corman shot out of the gates in the mid-1950s, directing and/or producing more than three dozen films between 1955 and 1961, directing doomsday disasters (Day the World Ended, Last Woman on Earth) and sci-fi quickies (It Conquered the World, Attack of the Crab Monsters), cheapie Westerns (Gunslinger, The Oklahoma Woman) and teen rave-ups (Sorority Girl, Teenage Doll), crime dramas (Machine-Gun Kelly; I, Mobster) and horror (A Bucket of Blood, The Undead), as well as the tales of Poe (House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum). But he tried something a little different with 1962’s The Intruder, a gripping, yet still exploitative, story of integration set in the ultraconservative south. Adapted by Charles Beaumont from his 1959 novel, which itself was inspired by the Little Rock Nine, the film stars William Shatner as Adam Cramer, a self-styled “social reformer” who arrives in the small southern town of Caxton just after integration has become law and just as ten black students, led by Joey Greene (Charles Barnes), are about to join whites at the local high school. Under the auspices of the John Birch-like Patrick Henry Society, Cramer is determined to continue the fight against integration, stirring the locals to potential mob violence through carefully orchestrated speeches filled with hate and lies. He allies himself with wealthy plantation owner Verne Shipman (Robert Emhardt) and cozies up to high school girl Ella McDaniel (Beverly Lunsford), daughter of newspaper editor Tom McDaniel (Frank Maxwell), one of the only reasonable white men in town. The manipulative Cramer will do just about anything to rile up the masses to keep the blacks from ruining America, but his own questionable personal morality might just get in the way, especially as he flirts with Vi (Jeanne Cooper), the wife of traveling salesman Sam Griffin (Leo Gordon).

Beaumont, who wrote nearly two dozen episodes of The Twilight Zone — though neither of the classics starring Shatner — appears in the film as Mr. Paton, a teacher in the school, along with fellow Twilight Zone scribe George Clayton Johnson, who plays Phil West; Johnson later wrote “The Man Trap,” the first regular episode of Star Trek. Indeed, The Intruder contains numerous Rod Serling-like elements, from the general social and political themes to Taylor Byars’s black-and-white cinematography and Herman Stein’s score. The Intruder is screening August 20 with Charles Guggenheim’s Oscar-winning short, Nine from Little Rock, as part of the BAMcinématek series “A Time for Burning: Cinema of the Civil Rights Movement,” which runs through August 28 with such other political films as Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow, Daniel Petrie’s A Raisin in the Sun, Edward Pincus and David Neuman’s Black Natchez, and St. Clair Bourne’s Let the Church Say Amen! The two-week festival was organized to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, but it now takes on even more meaning with the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that a central part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is unconstitutional.

CLYBOURNE PARK

In 1959, a community is at odds when a black couple is about to move in (photo by Nathan Johnson)

Walter Kerr Theatre
219 West 48th St.
Extended through September 2, $30 – $220
clybournepark.com

The best plays stay with you long after you leave the theater, making you think and encouraging an ongoing dialogue. Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park is one such play. As we exited the theater, my guest and I got into a heated discussion about several of the issues the complex story raises, for nothing about Clybourne Park is black and white, yet everything about Clybourne Park is black and white. Winner of the Tony and the Olivier for Best Play as well as the Pulitzer Prize, Clybourne Park is divided into two distinct halves that are cleverly linked in both obvious and subtle ways by writer Norris (The Infidel, Purple Heart) and director Pam MacKinnon (Completeness, The Four of Us). Inspired by A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, the first black playwright to have her work produced on Broadway, Clybourne Park opens in 1959, as Russ (Frank Wood) and Bev Stoller (Christina Kirk) are preparing to leave their lily-white neighborhood shortly after a family tragedy. When Karl Lindner (Jeremy Shamos) finds out that their house is being sold to a black couple, he tries to convince Russ not to go through with the deal, worried about what will happen to property values and afraid of potential white flight. Meanwhile, Albert (Damon Gupton) comes to the house to pick up his wife, Francine (Crystal A. Dickinson), who works as the Stollers’ maid, and he is not afraid to throw in his own two cents. As things threaten to explode, Karl’s wife, Betsy (Annie Parisse), a deaf woman who is pregnant, can’t quite understand why everyone is getting so mad at one another, and Rev. Jim (Brendan Griffin) finds that church doctrine is not going to help solve this problem either.

In 2009, a community is at odds when a white couple is about to move in (photo by Nathan Johnson)

The second act takes place fifty years later, in 2009, as a white couple, Steve (Shamos) and his pregnant wife, Lindsey (Parisse), have bought the very same house, now dilapidated, from a black couple, Lena (Dickinson) and Kevin (Gupton). As ditzy real estate agent Kathy (Kirk) shares some interesting tidbits about the changing nature of her business, the two couples are soon involved in a nasty battle that centers on the one word nobody wants to say: race. Clybourne Park is an extremely cleverly written play, tackling long-standing racial issues with intelligence, sensitivity, and humor. Having the actors play dual roles furthers direct comparison between the past and the present. Early in the second act, Steve is asked whether Lindsey is pregnant with a boy or a girl; while Steve knows the answer, Lindsey still wants to be surprised, so she puts her fingers in her ears and makes silly noises so as not to hear, echoing the deaf Betsy portrayed by Parisse in the first act. In the 1959 section, Russ is not ready to bring down a sentimental object from the attic; in 2009, hired hand Dan (Wood) is digging up the backyard, getting ready to potentially raze the house, much to the consternation of Lena, Kevin, and local resident Tom (Griffin), who is trying to address community rules. There are other fascinating, well-plotted similarities between the characters that the actors play in the first act with those they portray in the second act, giving the production a continuity that also shows how difficult it is for people to accept and adapt to change, no matter their race or religion. Clybourne Park is a smartly told story that clearly points out how far we truly are from a so-called post-racial society, a play that will stay with you for a very long time. (As an added bonus, the Lincoln Center Theater Review has dedicated its entire spring issue to the play, with pieces written by Paul Clemens, Beryl Satter, Bill Savage, and Patricia and Fredrick McKissack, an interview between Norris and John Guare, an interview with an anonymous real estate broker, and more; you can pick up a copy at the Walter Kerr Theatre for a dollar or download it for free here.)