Playwright: Alice Childress. At: The Artistic Home, 3914 N. Clark. Phone: 866-811-4111; $28.Runs through: March 20
It was once said of statesman Ross Perot, after his embarrassing "you people" speech to the NAACP in 1992, that he wasn't really racist, but "just didn't know any better." It was an accurate assessment, acknowledging as it did, the obstacles to self-defined autonomy presented by, not only that goal's avowed opponents, but its often misguided supporters.
Al Manners is a Hollywood director returning to Broadway, his proposed project a "trunk" drama set in the uneasy years following the American civil war, when emancipated slaves attempting to exercise their newly-granted voting rights risked fearful retribution at the hands of hostile vigilantes. He also looks forward to experimenting with the new "method" acting techniques, where performers' personal experiences inform the characters they portray. The younger, classroom-trained cast members take readily to sharing with their fellow artists, but the seasoned troupers fear putting their jobs in jeopardy by voicing opinionsuntil a veteran of stage and screen invokes her analytic freedom to challenge the boss, himself, thereby eliciting a confession eluding even its confessor's raised consciousness.
We in 2011 are quick to identify smug paternalism passing as humanitarian empathy, especially as professed in a play-within-the-play mawkish enough to make The Octoroon look like Dutchman. But while the fictional producer-director of Alice Childress' critical commentary emerges as an unwitting proponent of the inequities he sincerely believes that he deplores, the Artistic Home's decision to reviveduring Black History Month, of coursethe controversy of nearly a half-century past addresses unspoken prejudices still prevalent in our society today.
The faux fly-lines at the side of the Artistic Home's storefront stage and the leading ladies' Dior wardrobes locate us immediately in a dramatic universe where lunching on pizza and chianti was an adventure in exotic cuisine. And the well-chosen ensemblenone of whom appear old enough to recall the early days of the civil-rights movementevoke the climate of their period with uncaricatured conviction (assisted in no small part by director Vaun Monroe's psychologically revealing choreography). Velma Austin's steely dowager and John Mossman's clueless swaggerer dominate the action, but it's Cola Needham's second-act account of Jim Crow atrocities that holds us as spellbound with horror as it did audiences in 1954, when Childress' refusal to give her script a happier ending curtailed its chance at a Tony-eligible Broadway production.