Doing Good, Being Good

 

Why do institutions of religious systems appeal to folks wanting cover for their misdeeds?

Why do thieves and predators so often profess belief in divine goodness and morality? Is it just hypocrisy? If so, you don't need to be in a church to be a hypocrite, you just need to say one thing and do the opposite. Why get God involved?

The answer is no doubt quite complex, pulling from the behavioral and social sciences, lots of variables, and there probably isn't one answer that fits all cases. But I think one thing might tie most cases together -- society's assumptions about "people of faith."

Having belonged to more than my share of churches over the years and across the spectrum, I think inquiries could start with the buildings.

Domes, steeples, statuary and emblems of faith in wood, stone, glass and steel show affiliation, but they are also indicators that "good things" are going on inside God's house.

Sanctuary codes come to mind. For centuries, wrong-doers were protected from arrest if they made it to the altar. Lawmen would not pursue them for fear of their own eternal damnation. (This thinking was more common before the era of separation of church and state but might be resurrected in this new age.)

Today's thieves and sex offenders aren't seeking sanctuary from the police and solicitors, but I do think they believe agents of the law don't question church-going people (especially clerics) because a person who draws close to the Creator can't do bad things at the same time. (This might be the primitive thinking behind hanging the Ten Commandments in schools.) Some might also be thinking that miscreants who hide behind God won't escape Final Judgment.

Believers themselves show markers in their clothing, speech and behavior and recognize one another by them. This is that in-group and out-group thing we seem to be so fond of. And, people being people, in-group folk are not scrutinized because they are saying and doing the right things. Once thieves and predators have mastered the code -- the passwords and high signs -- they can get away with a lot.

And do.

The Devil, You Say?

The inside front cover ad in the May 1973 issue of After Dark: The National Magazine of Entertainment was for director Gerard Damiano's The Devil in Miss Jones, a picture that folks in-the-know say bridged the gulf between art house cinema and pornography.

I've never seen the movie, despite it being christened with legitimacy by mainstream critics like Judith Crist and Bruce Williamson, so I can't attest to its artfulness. I did watch the trailer though, and the movie sounds intriguing.

Miss Jones stars Georgina Spelvin (last name misspelled in the ad, but no matter, it was a common adult film starlet moniker) as a dead woman who makes a bargain with the devil's minions that were she allowed to return to the living she would commit every waking moment to lust and carnality. Satan could not resist that deal and off she went to do just that.

Spelvin -- nee Shelley Bob Graham -- turned 90 in March. According to her bio she appeared in more than 70 adult films during the 70s and early 80s (that's sort of hard to believe but whatev). Spelvin also appeared in mainstream pictures and on television, often in cameos as herself.

With such an impressive record of adult film performances, I am tempted (sic) to dub her "Porn's First Lady," but alas that title is already taken. 😆

Midas and the American Dream

For many of us, when greed is mentioned, the cautionary tale of King Midas springs to mind. Midas wished to be able to turn all he touched to gold, but in the end gained unimaginable wealth and lost his humanity.
On its surface, that ancient story might set tragic avarice in the world of powerful men, but that's not reality, is it?
Greed is not restricted to those who have already accumulated wealth or prosperity and just can't get enough.
Folks who don't have the proverbial "pot to pee in" or "window to throw it out of" can also be fixated on having more and more and more -- not necessarily more of what they need, just more.
Economists say U.S. citizens are currently carrying nearly $1.3 trillion in credit card debt, and I suspect that figure will skyrocket in the coming months. I also suspect most of this debt is borne by people living beyond their means.
About half of all monthly credit card balances are carried by people who earn less than $50,000 a year. Economists say they lack the necessary reserves to pay for emergencies or are responding to impulses triggered by Madison Avenue pitchpeople or social media influencers or their need to have more than the Joneses across the street.
Both the financial burden of daily living and the spirit of acquisition drive the American economy -- and make communitarianism, socialism, egalitarianism and related theories so threatening. This is also why concepts like "affordability" seem so foreign to the executive and his ilk, a class of people defined by accumulation and impulsiveness, whose god is capitalism wrapped in a thin democratic veneer.
The spirit of Midas is at the core of the executive's appeal, a man fans say has a magical touch, even fans whose existence is defined by their inability to pay their bills, save for emergencies, afford health care, suitable housing, etc.
And yet this need to have more -- especially more than the neighbors across the street, across the state line, or across the ocean -- is deep in American soil and water.
That slogan "America First" is not just a nationalist's battle cry -- it's a siren song for the greedy and selfish that too many of us rally around.

Labelle at Carnegie Hall 1973

 

Fifty-three years ago, Labelle performed at Carnegie Hall, a single-night performance that served as a marker of the group's transition from R&B "girl group" stylists to mistresses of funk, belting out Nona Hendryx's original compositions and dressing like David Bowie.

The year before Carnegie Hall, the trio -- Hendryx, Sarah Dash and leader Patti LaBelle -- released Moonshadow, a decent record that featured a nearly 10-minute rave up of the famous Cat Stevens song. I saw them perform that song and other numbers from Moonshadow as an opening act for Al Green at the Carter Barron Amphitheatre in D.C. in Aug. '72.

In '73, Labelle released the lukewarm Pressure Cookin' album, but the following year was their megahit Nightbirds, and that Grammy Hall of Fame anthem to Creole hoochie, "Lady Marmalade."

The 8 p.m. Carnegie Hall appearance included readings by poet Nikki Giovanni and only a half dozen songs -- Wild Horses, I Sold My Heart to the Junkman, Over the Rainbow, (Can I Speak to You Before I Go To) Hollywood, Four Women and Moonshadow.

As we can see from this ad in After Dark, tickets ranged from 3.50 to 6.50, or 30 to 60 bucks today. And, interestingly, tickets to shows at the Carnegie Hall do generally run about that according to the venue's website.

The Attention Economy

 

The regime's takeover of media enterprises is rooted in the general public's "need for the feed."

The executive, himself, is sustained by media creation and consumption. His media diet is like his actual dietary intake -- fast, highly processed, nutritionless. And he and his Cabinet -- an assortment of Twinkies, Moonpies and Yoo-Hoos -- are fine with that. After a full day of consuming trash on Fox News, he graces us with his nightly flatulence on Truth Social.

And now, the emptiness of media messages from properties already under the regime's influence/control is evident in once-respected CBS's reporting mandates that bear the strong odor of hands-off/hands-up to keep MAGA nation engaged.

None of this is completely new; some part of the developed world's economy has been based on selling public attention since mass media were invented.

But, one of the reasons -- perhaps the main reason -- legacy media struggled after the arrival of "new media" is advertisers discovered a more reliable, quantifiable way to monetize consumer attention. Advertisers -- who knew they were wasting money on media buys but were never sure how much -- no longer settled for newspapers' coverage and reach reports, which were wishful approximations, at best. Ad space/time buyers could actually measure which ads readers viewed and for how long. Eureka! When these measures were refined, print media revenue pipelines dried up.

Newsrooms responded with staff layoffs and the gradual shift from product thrown on lawns and delivered to mailboxes to that delivered via computer screens. And that, to quote the poet, "has made all the difference."

Now, information and news compete with scantily clad influencers pushing protein powder and Ozempic for some portion of those 960 waking minutes the average person has to give their attention to something. More and more that something is online.

Researchers tell us that from 2004 to 2023, pleasure reading among Americans declined by 40 percent -- 40 PERCENT. How do we get out of this?

I asked AI how one leaves the "attention economy," and it offered, without irony, "Leaving the attention economy means reclaiming your time, focus, and cognitive autonomy from the constant pull of algorithm-driven platforms. It’s not just about avoiding social media — it’s about reshaping habits, environments, and values so that attention is no longer commodified for profit."

Maybe pick up a book?

As Stephen King famously said, “Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.”

Amen.

Michael (2026) III

 

Antoine Fuqua's Michael (2026) includes the scene of Jackson's first rhinoplasty procedure.

The surgeon (Albie Selznick) tells Jackson (Jaafar Jackson) his face is fine as it is. But Michael says his nose isn't symmetrical; he wants it fixed. At one point, he also mentions his vitiligo and says he's using some topical treatment.

When he arrives home after the procedure, father Joseph (Colman Domingo) from whom he's slowly pulling away, stops the bandaged singer timidly making his way to his room. No words are exchanged -- "Why did you do it?" etc., just Joseph saying "May God" and letting Michael continue to his room.

The scene is most likely an apocryphal construction; neither man is alive to say if it is accurate. But I feel it pointedly captures one of the enduring mysteries around Jackson's public persona, i.e., what fueled his physical transformation?

The picture suggests some possible causes, but the most compelling for me is the subtext of Michael's slow disassociation from the person he was. He may have felt his personality (soul?) was imbalanced, that he was emotionally unsymmetrical? That he was trying to keep what comforted him -- the other members of his family as they were when he was a boy -- while pushing forward toward what challenged and frightened him -- the world.

This detachment might have also been the fuel for his brilliant creative spark, both as a composer even though I don't think he actually played an instrument, but more importantly as a master of movement.

I cannot think of anyone outside of the world of classical dance who showed greater control over their physical form than Michael Jackson. He was transcendent.

Michael (2026) II

 

I don't broker irony these days -- that would be like trying to sell kudzu in Alabama -- but I do find contradictions in the roiling discussion around Antoine Fuqua's Michael (2026) to be notable.

Critics and audiences are sharply divided over the picture that tells the story of Michael Jackson's rise from child phenomenon at age 8 to uniquely enigmatic adult megastar, roughly the years from 1966 to 1988. Jackson died in 2009.

Critics say the picture, which stars Jackson's 29-year-old nephew Jaafar (brother Jermaine's son), lacks depth and vital insight, covering familiar territory about parental abuse, while showcasing the abilities of the sumptuously talented Jaafar in recreated live performances of the Jackson 5 and Michael's solo work on stage and in the studio. In sum, the picture is a well-crafted but ultimately disappointing narrative about a mysterious cultural icon.

Audiences, particularly Jackson's Black fans, defend Fuqua's film as celebratory and respectful, especially in its treatment -- actually, lack of treatment -- of charges of child abuse leveled against Michael in his later years, beginning in 1993. Insiders say later chapters of the film will deal with that period -- how remains to be seen.

(While I found persuasive the claims against Jackson featured in Leaving Neverland, the 2019 film that has been removed from circulation by the Jackson estate, many (most?) others said, maybe reflexively, that the documentary was a hit job and a money grab. New charges have surfaced since the release of Fuqua's film, this time involving a family of four siblings who were close to Jackson for many years.)

Some Black fans might be conflating criticism of the film as cinema with criticism of the gifted young Jaafar, who quite likely triggers precious memories of his uncle. They might be reading criticism of Michael's importance to Black music, which is undisputed. Or they might be feeling white critics are attacking Black cultural agency and identity, which, if true, would add another level of irony to the mix.

Some Black defenders have warned white reviewers to tread carefully, and I find that dangerous and chilling. Not only does rejecting sincere reflection echo the drumbeat of the current administration's punishing paranoia, but it would suggest Michael's legacy could not withstand the scrutiny.

Gauntlets being thrown down in defense of Jackson run counter to the man's most enduring public image -- that of a unifying spirit, perhaps embodying in the most glaring personal display possible the blurring of racial, ethnic and cultural lines. The work he did in 1986 with Lionel Richie and Quincy Jones to create the "We Are the World" video and movement is a testament to his enduring affirming legacy as globalist and unifier.

How fans find peace with the contradictions in a revered figure is ultimately an individual struggle, but I don't believe anybody gets there by denying contradictions exist.

TBH, the intimate and tragic documentary This Is It, released just after Jackson's death, gives me more insight into the man than Fuqua's impressive biopic. I remember seeing it twice in one day in two separate theaters because it was so riveting.

Michael (2026)

 

Director Antoine Fuqua's Michael, the glitzy biopic about the King of Pop, will undoubtedly make a billion dollars, set toes a-tapping during screenings with its many musical numbers, and serve as a fantasia for fans of the revered Jackson, who died in 2009 at age 50.

It will also undoubtedly be met with puzzlement and skepticism from viewers who wonder if the film's narrative, written by Jim Logan (Skyfall, Gladiator, Any Given Sunday, among other fine films), is a sanitized tribute or the unvarnished truth? My call is it is more of the former than of the latter.

Jaafar Jackson, son of Michael's brother Jermaine, carries the weight of the picture on his slender shoulders, channeling his uncle's voice and movements to uncanny effect. Fuqua's splendid staging of Jaafar's singing and dancing is rightly to be celebrated.

The young Jackson's performance is often mesmerizing, but I wondered if his closeness to the subject of the film was not as much of a benefit as it might appear on first pass. Though he was only 7 when his uncle died, I can imagine expectations that he "get it right" were always present as he worked on the picture, which is produced by the Jackson family, wth the notable exception of Janet. What a burden!

Jaafar's work on the picture might have even more in common with Michael's professional life -- at least as presented in the film. Beginning when Michael was a wunderkind (the winning child actor Juliano Valdi), he was berated and beaten by his father, Joseph (Colman Domingo). Joseph was the brutal Svengali who shaped Michael and his four brothers into the Jackson 5 and rode their celebrity out of relative penury in Gary, IN, into enviable prosperity in Encino, CA. He insisted on perfection, pushing the boys unmercifully, as mother Katherine (Nia Long) stood at a distance, silent but unapproving. Everyone feared and resented Joseph, and that was his intent.

Domingo has a legendary range and an appetite for highly distinctive character parts; he appears to be at his most powerful playing villains (Bobby T in Running Man, Mister in The Color Purple, William Burke in Candyman, for example). Here, Domingo's Joseph is an unnerving presence, even when off-screen, for he has deeply wounded the film's title star. In fact, that appears to be the message of the picture, which will certainly strike more than a few as pat and unpersuasive.

I can imagine some taking exception to saddling Joseph with all of his youngest son's peculiarities -- his elfin-voice, predilection for toys and exotic animals, his strange fixation on the fairytale about the eternal boy Peter Pan and his "happy place" -- Neverland.

Some will question Logan's pop psych rendering of Jackson's infamous pathology, excluding the charges of misconduct with children, which do not appear in the picture -- at least not directly. There is a curious subtext during some scenes where Jackson is interacting with young fans, but that's all.

Others might question Katherine's role in her son's pathology, in his emotional immaturity. She tells Michael that he is special, different from his brothers, and all other children. This might have created a different kind of psychological scarring that the picture does not plumb.

Still, Jaafar Jackson's impressive performance is central and crucial to this uneven unraveling of the rise and fall of one of the most enigmatic of contemporary entertainers. And for that reason alone, it is worth the price of the ticket.

Armory memories

 

My neighborhood and school in Northeast D.C. were in easy walking distance to the Armory on East Capitol Street.

We good Catholic schoolchildren from St. Benedict's would parade in orderly fashion to the Armory for the water show or the flower show or some other "kid-friendly" event. I always thought the Armory had something to do with the Arboretum, which I still visit routinely when in the District.

Yeah, I always associated the Armory with "soft stuff," so you can imagine my surprise the day I saw armored vehicles on a neighborhood street, heading to the Armory, I was told.

What? Why? Memory is foggy but through the mist I see battleship gray, steel and turrets! Who knows how much I was borrowing from TV's "Combat!", but soldiers and armored vehicles were on the move.

I am pretty confident I was unaware of war as a "real thing" before that day, even though the U.S. was deep in the military conflict of Vietnam. It's not something 6-year-olds think about, I guess. And, besides, Catholic schoolchildren were at war with the devil.

From that day on, though, "armory" has meant "war," "war" has meant "guns," "guns" has meant "soldiers," "soldiers" has meant "shooting," and "shooting" has meant "dead people."

We all have to grow up sometime, right?

Colman Domingo

 

I did not know who Colman Domingo was before seeing him in his featured roles in the musical Passing Strange on Broadway back in 2008.

Domingo, 56, had appeared in small parts on television and film before then but somehow had escaped my attention. And that was my loss.

Domingo has proven to be a force of nature, taking on leading roles and supporting parts with equal gusto and impact, IMO. His list of acting credits over the past 30 years is enviable -- Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Selma, The Color Purple, among them -- and he's also produced and directed in TV and film.

Domingo was nominated for leading actor Academy Awards in two consecutive years and for two very different parts -- Divine G in Sing Sing (2004) and the title character in Rustin (2005). He won an Emmy for a guest appearance in HBO's Euphoria in 2022. He is no stranger to complexity.

Domingo's guest host role on SNL last weekend has been on blast since then; heralded as a game-changer. He will next be seen as Joe Jackson in the upcoming biopic Michael, and I am wondering what he does to bring to the screen a man who, we're told, not only built his gifted son's career but also destroyed his self-image.

I am also wondering if that part of the story will be in explicated in the movie, and, if not, if Domingo and director Antoine Fuqua will work it in somehow.

Proof

 

I read David Auburn's prize-winning play Proof last week because of its Broadway revival with Ayo Edebiri and Don Cheadle. I quite likely won't get to see this New York production, but I fully expect a local company -- Trustus, quite likely -- will mount one sooner rather than later. I think it would have broad appeal.

This spare but marvelous story is about a brilliant but mentally deteriorating University of Chicago mathematician named Robert and his 25-year-old daughter, Catherine, and her worries that, along with inheriting her father's facility with numbers, she might succumb to his mental illness. Is she one of the worried well?

Auburn sets the action on the back porch of Robert and Catherine's home. The story moves back and forth in time, a common device in modern drama that gets around the possible tedium of linear exposition, while unraveling the play's central puzzle.

The father/daughter relationship is the play's main concern, but it is given wonderful context by the two other characters, Claire, Robert's older daughter and Catherine's sister, and Robert's doctoral student/protege Hal, who all but lives in the professor's house as he explores his teacher's most recent recorded thoughts. Is there something groundbreaking there or just the ramblings of a withering mind?

As with many other classic and contemporary playwrights (O'Neill, Williams, Hellman, Miller, Albee, Jacobs-Jenkins) Auburn delves into tangled webs of family dynamics -- the celebrated and withholding father, the child who got out, the child who stayed, and the ward who might be trying to claim his own inheritance.

Auburn elegantly wrestles with love, anger, resentment, condescension, pain, forgiveness -- against a cold background, literally and figuratively, and reveals many relational truths.

A play with mathematics at its core would not ordinarily suggest warmth and humanity, but Auburn offers abundant "proof" that it is indeed possible.

Vive la resistance!

 

I was catching up with a longtime friend who was visiting Soda City the other day on a swing through the Southeast.

I asked him about his adventures since he's partially retired now; his job had taken him all over the world. He told me he wasn't traveling as much and was volunteering, along with others in his neighborhood, walking young Latinx children to school because the kids' parents did not feel safe from ICE.

"What do the children call you?"

"They just call us 'teacher'," he said. "To them, we're part of the school."

His language fluency helps tremendously with this mission, which I think is more authentically "Christian" than anything MAGA world has or can offer.

Resistance takes so many forms, doesn't it?

Dogma redux

 

The regime's bumbling fight with the Vatican led me to rewatch Kevin Smith's sporadically entertaining 1999 flick Dogma, which tells the story of two banished angels (Ben Affleck and Matt Damon) who find a loophole to get back into Heaven.

The loophole involves a New Jersey church that will offer papal reconciliation to anyone passing through its doors on a certain day. The angels, who were exiled to Wisconsin, begin to make their way to New Jersey, unaware that if they succeed all of creation is voided because God can't be proven wrong about their banishment.

At the same time, a Catholic abortion clinic worker with a special lineage (Linda Fiorentino) is commissioned by God's herald (Alan Rickman) to stop the angels. She would be accompanied by assorted human and celestial beings (Smith, Jason Mewes, Chris Rock, Salma Hayek), each contributing to the picture's dissertation on Catholic theology and the wide gulf between practitioners and the pulpit, presented in the most outrageously wild and often stunningly vulgar way possible.

I was still a regular attendant at Mass in 1999, so the picture resonated with me differently then. I wondered about the non-Catholics, though. Would they get the serious questions under the gags -- and there are many of both? I suppose I still do wonder that.

Smith's films are always heavier on wit than craft, I think, and Dogma is certainly that. It is worth noting, however, that Smith's claim that institutions are failed by their strictures is still relevant and very true.

Also in the cast are George Carlin and Jason Lee, and Bud Cort and Alanis Morissette have cameo roles as God.

August Wilson's Century Cycle -- Gem of the Ocean

 

August Wilson seems to have had a lot on his mind when he wrote Gem of the Ocean -- history, religion, folkways, maybe even politics, but most assuredly America's tradition of racial oppression and exploitation. Maybe that's why his major characters have such enormous speaking parts ... lots and lots of words, lots and lots of stories. Is it too much?

In Act One, Aunt Ester describes a dream in which Solly was leading a group of men in a ship across the water but the ship capsized and the men were lost. While this image connects with Solly's past as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, it also, because of the fate of the passengers, suggests to me a connection with the mythological figure of Charon, who conducted souls into the netherworld. It is curious that Aunt Ester asks to be taken back across the water. Why? Solly, of course, is determined to get his sister out of Alabama where white folks "have gone crazy." A fateful decision that maybe Ester foresaw.

Solly: "What good is freedom if you can't do nothing with it? I seen many a man die for freedom but he didn't know what he was getting. If he had known he might have thought twice about it." (Act One, Scene Two). August Wilson does not make it easy. His characters are complex and seemingly conflicted. Solly's determination to free his sister from a crushing existence in Alabama seems to suggest life two generations after Emancipation was not significantly better for blacks. Is he suggesting that life in bondage would be preferable to impoverishment?

Wilson describes Black Mary as Aunt Ester's protegee, which to me is an odd description. Ester's wisdom comes from her age (or agelessness). Black Mary is described as a young woman in her 20s, which suggests she did not make the crossing from enslavement to freedom. She seems to be defined most by the house and her relationship to Ester and her brother Caesar, with whom she differs not only in age but in temperament. She also differs from Citizen Barlow in that she's found some piece in loneliness.

"One after the other they come and they go. You can't hold on to none of them. They slip through your hands. They use you up and you can't hold them. They all the time taking till it's gone. They ain't tried to put nothing to it. They ain't got nothing in their hand. They got nothing to add to it." (Act One, Scene Four) Black Mary doesn't seem to be bitter, just resigned to the emptiness.

August Wilson's Century Cycle -- Joe Turner's Come and Gone

 

Joe Turner's Come and Gone is as dense in character storytelling as Gem of the Ocean but it feels a little less mystical, despite Bynum's "shining man" visions. I love the characters and because there are more female characters than Gem, the play has a different feel or texture to me, more romantic, perhaps.

“August had an incredible ear and he wrote the dialogue the way he heard it, adding his own magic touch as well. His characters are people who paint with language. They speak, in a sense, almost poetically by nature. One must honor and pay attention to the ways and style of our grandparents who migrated from the south where they were “southern colored people” and when they came north the only thing that changed was the location. In August Wilson’s writing there is no time to comment on what you say just respect the cadence, the couplets and triplets. These people have incredible wit, honesty and integrity. To survive in this country chasing the American dream it was imperative. Sometimes it takes three sentences to express one passionate, urgent, thought. It’s mellifluous, poetic and never pondered. It is part of the beauty of who we are descendants of the African griots; the keepers of our history, our culture, who never let us forget the glory of who we descended from. That’s August Wilson.” - Ruben Santiago-Hudson

Bynum's first monologue about finding his song is vital to understanding the world that Wilson is creating in Joe Turner. Bynum might very well be mad but the notion of an individual's song is a part of many native people's folklore. The monologue's power and artistry is reflected in the number of people who have recorded it on YouTube. This is one of the best presentations I have seen.

Mattie: Make him come back to me. Make his feet say my name on the road. I don't care what happens. M ake him come back.

Bynum: What's your man's name?

Mattie: He go by Jack Carper. He was born in Alabama then he come to West Texas and find me and we come here. Been here three years before he left. Say I had a curse prayed on me and he started walking down the road and ain't never come back. Somebody told me, say you can fix things like that. (Act One, Scene One)

Seth and Bertha Holly's boarding house seems to be a port for the disconnected, lost or those searching for others. That Great Migration from the South was not always direct and certain. As Mattie suggests, here route was much or circuitous and now that her mate has moved on she's not sure of her fate. Wilson's play overflows with the anxiety that accompanies rootlessness.

The characters Herald Loomis and his daughter Zonia are fascinating inventions who invoke much contemplation on the nature of the fatherhood -- at least, Wilson's perspective of it. Loomis and daughter arrive at the boarding house looking for his wife and his daughter's mother from whom they were separated on their trek north. Loomis seems to grow more desperate as the play progresses, convinced his Martha is nearby and eager to find her because their daughter is rapidly becoming a woman.

Loomis: Look at you. You growing too fast. Your bones getting bigger everyday. I don't want you getting grown on me. Don't you get grown on me too soon. We gonna find your mamma. She around here somewhere. I can smell her. You stay on around the house now. Don't you go nowhere.

August Wilson's Century Cycle -- Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

 

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is the play in the American Century Cycle that is not set in Pittsburgh. The action takes place in a recording studio where the great blues singer Ma Rainey is scheduled to record. Wilson's Rainey is bigger than life and rules over the proceedings even when she's not on stage.

Wilson seems to have special affection for quirky characters in whom he invests another level of moral messaging. In Ma Rainey, the character of Sylvester, Ma's stuttering driver and purported nephew from Arkansas, plays counterpoint to Levee's brash vanity. It might very well be that the ambling and affable Sylvester is actually a pawn in Ma's plan to keep everyone uneasy, to show who's boss. "All right boys, you done seen the rest now I'm gonna show you the best. Ma Rainey's gonna show you her black bottom."

Ma Rainey's sexual orientation is handled as subtext in the play and adds a level of tension between the queen and the ambitious Levee.

Cutler: Nigger, don't you know that's Ma's gal?

Levee: I don't care whose gal it is. I ain't done nothing to her. I just talk to her like I talk to anybody else.

Cutler: Well, that being Ma's gal, and that being that boy's gal, is one and two different things. The boy is liable to kill you... but you' ass gonna be out there scraping the concrete looking for a job if you messing with Ma's gal.

August Wilson's Century Cycle -- Fences

 

My sense is Wilson's Fences won the Pulitizer Prize because its story is more classically tragic than his other more mystical and declamatory works -- which might have appealed to Pulitzer judges. It is, in many ways, as great as Miller's Death of a Salesman, whose sad and self-deceived titular character shares much in common with Wilson's Troy Maxson -- a man haunted and frustrated, able to accept his own failings while abjuring those of his offspring. Rose's speech at the end is just as stirring as Linda Loman's declaration in Death that "attention must be paid."

Wilson's Fences, like others in the series, begins in medias res, with Troy and his sidekick, the earnest Jim Bono, getting off work. Troy's got a few things in the works and needs an audience, which his friend is eager to provide. By the end of Scene One, Wilson has introduced us to Troy's universe (he actually describes all of the characters in terms of their relationship to Troy), including his absent brother Gabriel. When Gabriel makes his appearance in the Second Act, those familiar with Wilson's universe understand Gabe's a messenger, the latest in a line of mystics, with one foot planted on the earth and the other in the spirit world. Gabe's battle with the hell hounds, which seem not to be molesting him but those he loves, is a foreboding classical theme made even more ominous when paired with Troy's tales of wrestling with the devil -- the devil of his own bitter and grasping nature.

Troy and Cory Maxson is the first staged father-son relationship Wilson has presented in the Century Series, and it's quite a study. Troy, an undereducated trash man, pours his regret and frustration on top of Cory, a young man who is puzzled by his father's animosity toward his desire to play football.

Troy: ... You go on and get your book-learning so you can work yourself up in that A&P or learn how to fix cars or build houses or something, get you a trade. That way you have something can't nobody take away from you. You go on and learn how to put your hands to some good use. Beside's hauling people's garbage."

It's not until the family is ready to lower Troy into the ground that Cory begins to understand the pain his father was in and to forgive him and his faults.

Wilson juxtaposes two powerful scenes in Act Two to show Troy's dishonorable fall -- Bono's departure and the fight with Cory. The two scenes have starkly different tones -- Bono's leaving his friendship with Troy is graceful, like the guileless man who tried to be Troy's conscience earlier, but the battle with Cory is fierce and bitter, like the father and son who have never really understood one another. Both are tragic and devastating events in the life of a man who's claimed to stare down the devil. At the end of the scene, Troy stands again daring Satan to come at him. He's finished the fence but, alas, it neither keeps love in nor does it keep harm out.

August Wilson's Century Cycle -- The Piano Lesson

 

The "lesson" of The Piano Lesson is learning the difference between value and price. Berniece and her brother, Boy Willie, view the piano with equal measures of devotion and sincerity. It is this sincerity -- and the struggle between value and price -- that makes the battle between the siblings so powerful and compelling an d won Wilson his first Pulitizer Prize.

When Wilson introduces Berniece's suitor Avery late in the first scene of The Piano Lesson, he describes him as "honest and ambitious" and one who is finding opportunities in the city that others aren't. That Avery is also a preacher and prophet is consistent with the playright's use of seers as guides for the other characters. Avery's description of the dream he said led to his calling is important, I feel, because it establishes, to whatever degree for audience members, his pastoral role and the important task that lies ahead for him as they try to expel Sutter's ghost, the residue of enslavement and oppression, from the house.

Near the end of Act 1, Boy Willie explains to Berniece and Doaker why he's so intent on selling the piano. "You can sit up here and look at that piano for the next hundred years and it's just gonna be a piano. You can't make more than that. Now I want to get Sutter's land with that piano. I get Sutter's land and I can go down and cash in the crop and get my seed. As long as I got the land and the seed then I'm alright." For Wilson's purpose, Sutter, of course, represents more than a dead white man. He epitomizes all that was taken from blacks in the South. And all that might be reclaimed.

The second half of Act Two Scene Three is the late night encounter between Lymon and Berniece, two bodies orbitting around Boy Willie, uncertain of their future but somehow, briefly, drawn together. Lymon is decked out in a suit he bought from Wining Boy and Berniece is in her night clothes. He's been outmanned by his friend while out on the town and comes to Berniece's alone with a bottle of cheap perfume and a little bit of hope. It's a touching scene, one of the tenderest Wilson crafted for this powerful play.

Wilson closes the play with the characters in a struggle with the terrible past. Boy Willie battles the ghost of the man he may or may not have pushed into a well and Berniece calls to her ancestors to give him strength to fight. The sound of train pulling in evokes the story of the Yellow Dog and the souls seemingly trapped for eternity in it. Wilson weaves together stark realism with the mystical and the fantastic, suggesting that the spirit world is never, ever far away.

August Wilson's Century Cycle -- Seven Guitars

Wilson's Seven Guitars opens with a funeral and ends with a murder. Death is always present in his plays; ghosts linger in houses and in the minds of the characters. Because of the play's structure, we know that the love affair between Vera and Floyd is doomed. So, the play's mystery is not whether she'll go with Floyd. To me, the mystery is which of the forces at work will prevent it.

Scene Two of Seven Guitars features the familiar duet between a needy, ambitious man and the woman he feels will make him whole. Floyd and Vera do a two-step of flirtation and recrimination, with Vera making it clear that missing her man's touch, after he's abandoned her for another woman, is a pain she doesn't want to revisit. The end of the scene shows her sweetening a bit but there's still a lot of miles between Pittsburgh and Chicago, Floyd's Promised Land.

The character of Hedley continues in the tradition of the hoodoo-mystics Wilson features so prominently in his work. Of the seven characters, Hedley, an amateur herbalist and chicken processor, is the one living closest to the earth, seems at once the most grounded and, as the audience discovers in short order, the maddest. The fateful misunderstanding that closes the play seems doubly tragic -- as two beloved characters clash, needlessly, lowers a dark pall over Hedley.

August Wilson's Century Cycle -- Two Trains Running

 

Two Trains Running is Wilson’s most insular play, with the action confined to the front area of small diner run by the angry and fiery Memphis. The patrons who wander in and out bring with them the worries of a world in the midst of violent change and never-ending uncertainty for blacks. Once again, Wilson has committed much of the pain felt by African-Americans to a young man, Sterling, who wants more than he can achieve and can’t seem to get out of his own way.

In many ways, Risa is like the other damaged women from Wilson's century: Wary of the men they find themselves surrounded by and shouldering pain and bearing scars. But unlike the others whose scars are hidden, Risa has etched hers onto her legs with a razor, perhaps as reminders of past troubles but most certainly to turn away the pestering men who frequent the diner. Though Sterling is intent on winning her, Risa is not at all open to his advances. She extends herself to no one except Hambone, another damaged soul whom she protects from the others, and the unseen Prophet Samuel, a Daddy Grace-style evangelist who has shown her scripture and holy attention. She proves to be one of Wilson's more inscrutable creations.

In Seven Guitars, Wilson opens the play just after the burial of Floyd Barton, the central charater in that story of hope refracted through disappointment and deceit. Two Trains Running closes with a funeral. Neither funeral is staged but both represent the second of the two trains all of us must ride -- one for life and the other for death, according to Wilson. Hambone's death is coincident with the departure of Prophet Samuel, a larger than life community figure who never appears on stage. The mechanics of the prophet's funeral consumes much of the characters' attention. Wilson's mad herald, Hambone, makes frequent appearances throughout the play, reciting his sad refrain --"He gonna give me my ham." And his sudden disappearance introduces an unsettling and foreboding air. Hambone boards death's train unceremoniously, in his sleep, having never received from life what he felt he deserved. And, as is common in Wilson's tragic world, another character's closing act of rash foolishness guarantees that he himself will be denied.

August Wilson's Century Cycle -- Jitney

In Jitney, August Wilson displays a weary concision not present in his earlier works. The last play in the Century Cycle to be completed, Jitney contains the familiar Wilson themes -- men trying to become more than they are and pushing against forces that appear fixed on denying them. Noticeably absent are the mystic undercurrents, the lengthy monologues and the narrative complexity that made his earlier works much more epic in vision and execution. Jitney is a simple and direct story of "urban renewal," displacement, resistance and loss. For some, it is equal to others in the Cycle. But to others, myself include, it feels like a comparatively minor work, strong but delivering few fresh insights.

Wilson confines Jitney's action to the dispatch office where the drivers receive calls for service. The constant entrances and exits of the jitney drivers keeps the action in the shop connected to an off-stage world. Toward the end of the first scene, Youngblood enters to report that a neighborhood resident, Cigar Annie, has been evicted and is standing in the street cursing mankind and flashing drivers. The woman never makes an appearance but seems to represent a kind of woman in Wilson's universe, one who has been so exploited and diminished by those around her that she's left without fear. As Doub says, "Ain't nothing wrong with Cigar Annie. They had her down in Mayview two or three times. They figure anybody cuss out God and don't care who's listening got to be crazy. They found out she got more sense than they do. That's why they let her go. She raising up her dress cause that's all anybody ever wanted from her since she was twelve years old. She say if that's all you want ... here it is."

Jitney's struggling couple Rena and Youngblood (Darnell) provide little of the romantic dynamism found in Wilson's other works. The tension between the two, Rena's insistence that Youngblood be a better provider for their child, is worsened by Turnbo's tireless tattling. While the destructive gossip is an hoary theatrical staple (The Children's Hour), it seems to me a device that's beneath Wilson's creative mettle and too meager to carry so much narrative weight.