RED TAILS: Blasts Black American History into Theatres

“Red Tails,” George Lucas’ major motion picture tribute to the Tuskegee Airman, was released just a few days after Martin Luther King, Jr. ’s birthday and became the “must see movie” in Black communities nationwide.
For opening weekend, the action/fighter pilot film was the destination of bus trips packed with church groups and youth organizations, fraternities and sororities, parents with teens, Facebook friends and even college alumni groups. Howard University, my alma mater, had alumni meet-ups for “Red Tails” at Harlem’s Magic Johnson Theater and a New Jersey cinema. Black audiences were drawn by the urge to celebrate and promote the historic accomplishments of these war heroes. The result was an approximate $20 million box office and a number two slot for the epic World War II film.
Lucas, the producer of action, special effects milestones “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones,” had a 23-year struggle with the major studios to get Tuskegee Airmen story produced. The studios didn’t believe that a big budget Black action film would make money in the U.S. and overseas. So, he personally funded “Red Tails” to the tune of $100 million.
“Red Tails” not only focuses on Black characters, it has a Black executive producer Charles Floyd Johnson (first Black executive producer of a network drama series with the “Rockford Files”), writers (Aaron McGruder (“Boondocks”) and John Ridley (“Three Kings”) and director Anthony Hemingway (“Heroes” and “The Wire”).
“It’s my second go around as a Tuskegee Airmen, I was in the HBO film,” said Cuba Gooding Jr. during an interview in New York. “Every day on the set we had real Tuskegee Airmen. We’d sit around and ask them stories. I would always find out an interesting fact on their accomplishments. Everyday has been eye opening.”
One of the advisors was acclaimed Tuskegee Airman Dr. Roscoe Brown, former president of Bronx Community College. “We’re been trying to do this (movie) for 65 years. We’re really gratified that at last it has happened,” said Dr. Brown. “People will now know about us, who didn’t know before. There is a cadre of people that knew how good we were and what we had done. In fact, our military record helped to bring about the end of segregation. When President Harry Truman signed Executive order that was the first official end of segregation in the military.”
The film boasts an Oscar winner, Gooding Jr. for “Jerry Maguire” and an Oscar nominee Terrence Howard for “Hustle & Flow.” These movie vets acted as mentors on and off screen for an impressive younger drama ensemble: Nate Parker (“The Great Debaters”), David Oyelowo (“The Help” and “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”), Elijah Kelley (“Hairspray”), Tristan Wilds (“The Wire”) and Ne-Yo (“Stomp the Yard”).
“We are proud of these young actors. They treated us like the colonel and the general,” laughed Howard. “When you hear about the Red Tails, the Tuskegee Airmen, they were a select legendary group of people. We meet them when they were human, flesh and blood, before they became legendary.”
The film also garnered the interest of two U.S. presidents. The “Red Tails” cast attended a special Houston screening with President George H.W. Bush, a World War II Air Force veteran, and Dr. Mae C. Jemison, the first African American woman ever to become a U.S. astronaut. In addition, the cast, George Lucas and many original Tuskegee Airmen were guests of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama for a private screening at the White House.
“I’ve done 60 films and never before have I screened a film with a president,” said Howard.

Meet Vera Stark – A Maid’s Tale

It’s been a season of Black maids from “reel to real”. There are entertainment showcases with a glimpse at Black maids in 20th century America.  Like the film The Help, set in 1963 Jim Crow Mississippi and the Off-Broadway comedy By The Way, Meet Vera Stark, a fictional exploration of a 1930’s Hollywood maid who becomes a scene-stealing movie actress playing maids. Then there’s the recent real-life 21st century victimization of two Black maids from African nations who bravely filed charges of being sexually attacked by wealthy businessmen while working in New York City’s elite hotels.

It’s interesting that Black women doing “days work” is getting a close-up view in pop culture and global news. I am the daughter of a housekeeper. In fact, although my mother had many jobs throughout her life—from being one of the first Black telephone operators at Western Electric to co-founding the first daycare center in our New Jersey town, during the 1970’s and 1980’s she worked as a housekeeper doing “days work” to help pay the family bills. Some of her friends still dabbled in “days work” even in their seventies, making extra money washing floors and dusting furniture.

In the Off-Broadway comedy By The Way, Meet Vera Stark, Brooklyn’s Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage turns the spotlight on Black actresses from the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s who were segregated to the roles of the maid. Now playing at the Second Stage Theater until June 12,  By The Way, Meet Vera Stark, stars glamorous Sanaa Lathan (Love & Basketball, Alien vs Predator and Something New) in a story inspired by the glamorous Black actress Theresa Harris.

Nottage, a MacArthur “genius” fellow, is renowned for her work on Black women from her critically acclaimed turn-of-the-century Off Broadway drama Intimate Apparel, which starred Viola Davis to her Pulitzer prizewinning Broadway drama Ruined, about women in war-torn Congo.  Mesmerized by Harris’ performance as Barbara Stanwyck’s maid and friend in the 1933 film Baby Face, Nottage amassed a collection and study of this forgotten supporting star whose spotlighted roles were mostly maids. Harris’ films ranged from Professional Sweetheart where her character Vera teaches Ginger Rogers how to be sexy to classics like Jezebel, The Women, Cat People and Miracle on 34th Street. “As an actress, she was progressive,” Nottage told the New York Times.  “She was asserting her presence in the films. I wouldn’t argue that it’s entirely directors. I would argue that there’s something this woman did that was unique — that demanded directors pay attention.” By the mid-1950s, Harris married a doctor and retired from the movies.

By The Way, Meet Vera Stark is the creative collaboration of two very smart Black women. Both are Ivy Leaguers.  Nottage holds a bachelor’s from Brown University and a master’s in drama from Yale.  Lathan earned a bachelor’s from Berkeley and a master’s in drama from Yale. Together, they take the audience on a 70-year journey through the life of the fictional Vera Stark, an out-of-work Black actress who takes a job as a maid for a Hollywood star. Then uses her theatrical talents to quit her day job as a maid to perform as a maid on the big screen.

This is Lathan’s first star turn on the New York stage.  She earned a Tony nomination for the Broadway run of  A Raisin in the Sun with Sean Combs and Phylicia Rashad, then co-starred in the London stage production of  Cat on a Hot Tin Roof  with James Earl Jones and Phylicia Rashad. 
 

“There are so many amazing Black actresses out there who are so talented, and they’re just kind of, I can’t say forgotten, but they’re kind of in the shadows,” Lathan told Broadway.com.  “The roles out there for women of color are few and far between, and it’s really wonderful to not only be playing a Black actress but, in a weird way, to bring a Black actress’ journey to life.”

Over the years, I’ve interviewed veteran Black actresses dating back to Theresa Harris’ era, who had roles as Hollywood and Broadway maids. The late great actress and theatre producer Rosetta LeNoire worked with her godfather Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and even Orson Welles, but gained TV fame as the grandmother in Family Matters. LeNoire would remark that during her early career,  “I always knew my costume would be a maid’s uniform.” Butterfly McQueen appeared on WLIB talk several times and would tell us about her college degrees and memories of  Gone  With The Wind. Actress and Negro Ensemble Company co-founder Clarice Taylor, who recently passed away at 93, was renowned as Dr. Huxtable’s mother in The Cosby Show, but thriller fans knew her as Clint Eastwood’s ill-fated maid in the 1970’s hit  Play Misty for Me.  Broadway star and TV pioneer Gertrude Jeannette, founder of Harlem’s HADLEY Players, befriended  playwright Tennessee Williams who expanded her role as a maid in the Broadway drama Vieux Carre.These women gave a voice and dignity to the Black women that did “days work.”

“Even though she’s a fictional character, she is representing all of the Black actresses through the ages and their struggle,” Lathan explained to Broadway.com about Vera Stark. “The struggle is different today, obviously, than it was for someone like Vera Stark in the 1930’s, but there is still a long way to go in terms of opportunity.”

Culture & Flash

James Earl Jones is Driving Miss Daisy on Broadway

James Earl Jones sat onstage at the New York Times‘ TimesTalks program and told the audience: “I am a journeyman. I walk and pick up roles where I can find them.”
Well, his latest walk has taken him to Driving Miss Daisy. Jones has joined film legend Vanessa Redgrave for a limited revival of the Pulitzer-, Tony- and Oscar- winning story about the relationship between an Atlanta Black chauffeur and a Jewish widow in the Jim Crow South. Audiences watch the two superstars at the Golden Theater verbally spar and physically age onstage over the decades from the 1940′s through the 1960′s.
Jones has easily slid into the role of Hoke, a part made famous on stage and screen by Morgan Freeman. “Both Morgan and I are from Mississippi. We know people like that,” he remarked. “I know Hoke. Hoke is a throwback. He doesn’t have the power of speech and he doesn’t read. He’s a lot more intelligent than his speech would suggest.”
Ironically, speech has always been a problem for the man with the most famous voice in America. “I’m a walking irony,” said Jones.  “I am still a stutterer and my main focus is to communicate.”
The son of the late actor Robert Earl Jones (The Sting) grew up with his grandmother and was very shy as a child. Jones said he was almost mute until a teacher inspired him. He said, “If you love words, you have to say it out loud.”
As a student at the University of Michigan, Jones entered theater with his first role-as a horse. By 1957, he made his Broadway debut and within three years Jones began a long affiliation with Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival. During the 1960′s, he performed in the park with George C. Scott and later both appeared in the classic film Dr. Strangelove.  Both were nominated in 1969 for Oscars in signature roles-Scott for Patton and Jones for the Great White Hope.  Scott’s general won.
So far, the Oscar has eluded Jones. Still, his work has earned a treasure trove of other awards: two Tonys, four Emmys, a Golden Globe, two Obies, five Drama Desks and a Grammy, the National Medal of Arts, the John F. Kennedy Center Honor and the Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement.
Back in the 1970′s, studios even talked with him about starring as the original Shaft. “I’m a country boy,” he laughed. ” I don’t know how to act like a street dude.” Instead, he was offered stalwart types-admirals, generals, judges, kings and even  The Man, the 1972 film about the first Black president of the United States.
Audience favorites include: The Lion King, Claudine, The River Niger, The Greatest, A Piece of the Action, Bingo Long and the Traveling All-Stars, Coming to America, The Hunt for Red October, Cry the Beloved Country, Field of Dreams, Star Wars and the list goes on.
Broadway is still his base. Jones onstage is an unforgettably powerful performer. August Wilson had said he wrote Troy, the Tony winning character from Fences, with Jones in mind. “Fences was not just a social message, it was a political message,” said Jones.  He saw Denzel Washington’s Tony-winning performance. “He did beautifully with it,” he said. “The audience would like to just eat him up,” Jones laughed.
Jones is turning 80 and is married and has an adult son. He reminisced about creating fatherly bonds with two actors who played his sons on Broadway. The original Fences son (Courtney Vance) “just makes me weep,” he remarked. “The minute I laid eyes on Terrence Howard, I knew he was my son,” he said of his Cat on a Hot Tin Roof co-star.
While performing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in London, masses of Star Wars fans would line up outside the theater waving posters, helmets and other Star Wars memorabilia hoping to be signed by Jones, the voice of Darth Vader.
Jones knows the power of the voice. “If you fall in love with your own voice,” he said, “no one else will listen to it.”

Tyler Perry’s “For Colored Girls” Takes Ntozake Shange’s Prose to the Big Screen
Over 35 years have passed since Ntozake Shange’s courageous choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf burst onto the New York stage. Shange’s poetic, dramatic, stark storytelling about a rainbow of experiences of a group of Black women with romance, family, dance, abortion, music, violence, rape, God and self-love mesmerized audiences. It was taken to stages Off Broadway and on Broadway by theatrical legends producer Joseph Papp, associate producer Woodie King, and director Oz Scott. The production earned Obie Awards and a Tony for actress Trazana Beverley.
In 1982, PBS broadcast a special production of For Colored Girls…directed by Scott and starring Shange, Beverley, Lynn Whitfield and Alfre Woodard, which is available on DVD. For decades, the production has been a staple for young women in regional theaters and college classrooms nationwide. Now it is a major motion picture by Tyler Perry with a cast of top Hollywood actresses.
“It was intimidating work,” Tyler Perry admitted at a packed press conference in New York. “It means so much to many people. Especially women.”
Surrounding Perry was a stellar group: Janet Jackson, Thandie Newton, Phylicia Rashad, Anika Noni Rose, Loretta Devine, Kimberly Elise, Kerry Washington, Macy Gray and newcomer Tessa Thompson.  Whoopi Goldberg was a no-show, she is working her day job on The View.
For Colored Girls was filmed this summer in Harlem and at Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta. Kerry Washington (Ray, Mr. & Mrs. Smith) was starring on Broadway and found herself shooting her social worker role in Harlem during the day and racing to the stage to be in Race at night. When the crew moved to Atlanta, she was amazed to be filming at Tyler’s Sidney Poitier Soundstage and  Ruby Dee/Ossie Davis Soundstage. “It showed we can own our stories,” she said: Kimberly Elise (Diary of a Mad Black Woman, John Q) had to let go of her peaceful life of meditation and diet to tackle the difficult life of Crystal. “I began with five gray hairs and finished the production with 50,” she stressed. “Crystal wasn’t connected and she walks through the film disconnected.”
For Janet Jackson (Why Did I Get Married), her recent collaboration with Perry was a different dramatic experience. “Acting has always been a challenge for me,” she explained. She found magazine publisher Jo to be “shrewd, bold, she has a lot of bitch inside her.”
To British actress Thandie Newton (The Pursuit of Happyness, Crash), the poetry was an extension of each character. “Emotion took over for words,” she said. “I went to a completely new place. It worked so perfectly to express the inexpressible.”
The parts were so intense for the actresses that Perry, at times, had to safely sooth them out of their characters.
“He would say ‘come on back up,’” said Elise. “He’s been there as an actor.”
“I know how difficult it is to go that deep,” added Perry. “It was important for them to know they were safe.”
Like actor Forrest Whitaker directing author Terry McMillan’s acclaimed Waiting to Exhale, with an all-Black female cast (which included Loretta Devine), actor-director Perry found himself surrounded by top actresses and retelling a work by a renowned Black woman writer.
“As a man, it is difficult to understand a lot of this,” he explained. “I talked with Ntozake a lot.”
The men of For Colored Girls, actors Michael Ealy (The Good Wife, Takers), Omari Hardwick (The A Team, Miracle at St. Anna), Richard Lawson (How Stella Got Her Grove Back), Hill Harper (CSI: NY) and Khalil Kain (Girlfriends), take the audience on an emotional roller coaster with their relationships.
“The men were just as committed,” said Perry. “They wanted to make sure they were supporting the women.”
Like her character Gilda in For Colored Girls, there’s a serenity about Phylicia Rashad (The Cosby Show).  “All women in the world are colored girls,” the  Broadway star told the press corps.  “When we understand women correctly, society changes.”

Sheree Renee Thomas Recommends True Terror Tales
Halloween might be over but the popularity of terrifying tales of horror, fantasy and science fiction will not die. Sheree Renee Thomas, the acclaimed editor of the award-winning short story tome Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, is considered a leading literary expert in the genre. Her books have traced the African-American speculative fiction writers from W.E.B. DuBois to L.A. Banks.
“Black readers love to read. Speculative fiction, science fiction, fantasy and horror are genres that when done well, truly challenge readers and spark our imaginations,” she pointed out.  “That’s what I’m looking for when I curl up with a book, something that’s going to challenge my default settings and make me think that wonderful question that inspires all stories, “What if…?”
I touched base with Sheree to recommend her favorite top ten Black sci-fi and supernatural writers. Literary legends Octavia E. Butler (Kindred and Wild Seed) and Samuel R. Delany (Dhalgren) led the list. They were followed by Tananarive Due (The Between and My Soul to Keep) and  Nalo Hopkinson (Brown Girl in the Ring and Skinfolk).  In addition, she enjoys Andrea Hairston (Mindscape), Nnedi Okorafor (The Shadow Speaker and Who Fears Death), N. K. Jemison (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms) and Steven Barnes (Blood Brothers, Lion’s Blood and Zulu Heart). For vampire mavens she lists  Terrence Taylor’s series Bite Marks about New York vamps and Black folks in the 1980′s and Minion by L. A. Banks, described by Sheree as “Sankofa meets Buffy the Vampire and you’ve got a wild ride!”
To Sheree, the current sci-fi boom in books, television, movies and even theater is happening because we are living in an increasingly more sci-fi world. “Who would have thought we’d be reading books from small, portable tablets, or that the Internet would change the way we even use our phones?  Our tech is moving so fast it’s all our spirits and minds can do to try to keep up,” she explained. “Pop culture embraces the changes, so here we are watching television shows and programs that attempt to imagine those changes for us.”
Right now, Shotgun Lullabies, a collection of magical and terrifying short stories and poetry penned by Sheree Renee Thomas, is scheduled for release in January 2011. For aspiring sci-fi, fantasy and speculative fiction writers, check out her 2011 Writer’s Workshop at Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center.

Denzel Washington and Viola Davis Tear Down Fences on Broadway

Time is running out to check out Denzel Washington’s powerful performance in the hit revival of Fences.

His acclaimed role as patriarch Troy, in the first Broadway revival of August Wilson’s classic drama, has earned him amazing critical raves, sold-out performances, and a prestigious Tony Award for Best Actor in a Drama. Fences is running at the Cort Theater until July 11.

After a five-year lapse from the New York theater, the two-time Oscar winner (Glory and Training Day) and New York metro area native has returned triumphantly to the stage. Now, its under the direction of Kenny Leon, who won acclaim bringing Sean Combs to Broadway in the Tony winning revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun. Leon, now Broadway’s leading African-American director, was mentored by both Wilson and Lloyd Richards, Wilson’s longtime director who headed Yale University’s drama school and directed the original production of “Raisin in the Sun.” Leon, the director of August Wilson’s “Century Cycle” of plays at the Kennedy Center, had been nominated for Tony Awards for August Wilson’s “Gem of the Ocean” and “Radio Golf.” Through his brilliant production of “Fences,” the play picked up a coveted Tony Award for “Best Play Revival.”
Weeks before the star-studded opening of “Fences,” I found myself sitting at a roundtable interview at Sardi’s Restaurant with Washington and the cast. It gave me flashbacks to attending a special 1987 press dinner with August Wilson, James Earl Jones, director Lloyd Richards and the original cast of “Fences” at the Alconquin Hotel, another legendary theater gathering space.

I had covered Washington during his New York Off-Broadway theater days at the Negro Ensemble Company and Woodie King’s New Federal Theater. Back in the late 70′s and early 80′s, Washington was considered a major New York theater actor. He was a leading actor in high profile Off -Broadway productions like his Obie Award -winning performance in the Negro Ensemble Company production of Charles Fuller’s “A Soldier’s Play, which earned a Pulitzer Prize (he revived his role on film in “A Soldier’s Story”). Portraying Malcolm X in Laurence Holder’s “When The Chickens Come Home to Roost,” produced by Woodie King, mesmerized audiences, including a young Spike Lee, who later cast Washington in his Oscar-nominated role of Malcolm X.

Yet his Broadway turns in the Ron Milner-Woodie King production of “Checkmates” and later in the drama “Julius Caesar” received little accolades.

The idea to come back to the New York stage began when Hollywood producer Scott Rudin brought Washington a screenplay of “Fences” and tried to persuade him to make the film. Instead, it compelled Washington to read August Wilson’s play.

“I went and read the play and cried. Then laughed. It’s a great, great, great, great play,” recalled Washington, casually dressed in jeans and a tee shirt and still strikingly handsome in his fifties.

“Very rarely to you get to work and interpret the work of a master. A grand master. And August Wilson is one. He is Eugene O’Neill. He is Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. It’s a masterpiece,” Washington stated. “I’ve been around. I’ve read a lot of plays and screenplays. “Knowing he’s gone and I fortunately got a chance to meet him. You can feel him. His plays are spiritual.”

The international movie star likes his new role being back on the New York stage. “What I love about theater and what I love about it now, given the position that I’m in, is that it gives me a chance to be one of the guys,” he stressed. “I’m another member of the cast. I have a role to play. This is what I love.”

“This is how I started as an actor in the theater right up the block at Lincoln Center,” he explained. “When I left New York in 1982, I was doing a Pulitzer Prize winning play. I had just done When The Chickens Come Home to Roost and followed that up with A Soldier’s Play, which won a Pulitzer Prize. I left to go to LA to do what I thought was a 13-week job called St. Elsewhere. Four kids and 25 years whatever years later, I started working my way back. I never really felt that LA was my home. New York is my home. Now we have a home here.”

Although at 55, he is a similar age to James Earl Jones, when Jones created Troy on Broadway, Washington brings a different type of theatrical magnetism to the role.
“They are specific about this African American family, but the themes are universal. The husband and wife relationship, the bitterness of the husband about not being successful in life, dreams deferred, and the father and son relationship,” said Washington. “All of those themes-black, white, blue, green and yellow-we all relate to them.”
Viola Davis, who portrays wife Rose, was undeterred about possible comparisons with actress Mary Alice, who was in the original production. Davis is a Broadway star and August Wilson favorite. She won a Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards for Wilson’s King Hedley II and grabbed Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle nominations for his drama Seven Guitars.

“It’s always easier when people have no expectations, because then you are always going to be surprised,” said Davis, who believes the audience has to be open. “You have to come with a blank slate and then you have to allow whatever the actors are doing to infuse you, to move you.”
The Julliard trained actress has been appearing in TV and films since 1996. She’s been featured in director’s Steven Soderberg’s Traffic and Syriana and Jim Sheridan’s Get Rich or Die Tryin.’ Also, she’s been popular with Black directors like Denzel Washington’s Antoine Fisher, George Wolfe’s Nights in Rodanthe and Debbie Allen’s Lifetime film The Fantasia Barrino Story: Life is Not a Fairy Tale.
Yet, it was her heartbreaking performance in the film Doubt as the mother of the lone African American child in a strict Catholic school in the sixties that earned her national acclaim. The scene stealing performance with Meryl Streep scooped up Oscar, Golden Globe, SAG and Critics Choice Awards nominations. Audiences can currently see her on HBO’s United States of Tara and the Tom Cruise movie Knight and Day. This summer, she plays Julia Roberts’ best friend in the highly awaited Eat Pray Love.
Returning to the work of August Wilson and creating such a poignant performance as Rose in Fences has won the actress raves and another Tony Award. “We all have a little Wilsonisque in us,” explained Davis. “Because it’s our experience. It an African-American experience. Our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers our grandparents.”