The young and extremely attractive actresses Ronalda Douglas and Sheila Anderson portray the Pigeon Sisters, the upstairs neighbors of Felix Unger and Oscar Madison in The New Odd Couple which premieres at 8:30 p.m. Friday, October 29 [1982] on ABC. (This time out the famous mismatched pair are two black men: Ron Glass as [neatnik] Felix and Demond Wilson as [slob] Oscar. The new version, said Sheila Anderson, contains "a lot of silliness but always with a degree of intelligence." For one thing, she explained further, Wilson and Glass would refuse to take part in the show if it followed an "Amos 'n Andy concept" (which is how she described TV's image of blacks). And for another, "We have very intelligent writers. We have several black writers on the show and they don't think very highly of that kind of method."
Both Sheila Anderson and Ronalda Douglas come to the series with a varied background in theatre, commercials, and modeling. "This [The New Odd Couple] is actually my biggest opportunity thus far aside from working with Mr. [Bob] Fosse," said Anderson. (She appeared in All That Jazz and was edited out but got the chance to work with Fosse again in the upcoming film Star 80, the story of the murdered Playboy centerfold Dorothy Stratton. Anderson plays a dancer named Shay.)
Anderson, a native of New York City, began her acting career in commercials while working as a model. And despite her newfound success as a television actress, she remains a "very basic" person. "I try to keep myself as close to the ground as possible. My friends tell me since I've been home that they didn't see any changes, thank God."
Anderson is one of three children born to Sheila Guyse, an actress who appeared in many black circuit films in the 1930s and '40s, and Kenneth Davis, a dancer. Her parents (now divorced) did not encourage her as a child to pursue a show business career. "It was rough, especially in those days and they didn't want to see me suffer and go through a lot of the changes that they went through. But it's a lot different now. Not too different but it's different. Now my mother's thrilled, she's ecstatic."
But Anderson's talent does not stop with acting. Her interest in metaphysics in which she meditates in order to seek answers to personal and career problems led her to write a metaphysical children's book, The Land of Happy. She also has written a book of poetry called Walking Against the World. Both books are yet to be published.
One other passion of hers is music. "You can shut me up with a stereo," she said, "and I'll be fine."
The other Pigeon Sister, Ronalda Douglas was born in a small town in Louisiana to parents who were educators. Like Sheila Anderson, she was a good student--straight "A"s--because her parents, especially her father, who has degrees in math and philosophy, stressed academic excellence. She began singing at the age of three in a talent show and later in church choirs. And although they encouraged her and her siblings to do whatever they wanted in life, "there was a point though when my father got a little worried that I would tend to be one-sided. In other words, only have music, only have theatre and he, I don't think, really believed in that. He wanted me to take other things just in case I didn't make it." She laughed. Part of the regimen was athletics, i.e. basketball, volleyball, swimming, et cetera. She is still very athletically-inclined.
At one point in her life, Douglas studied opera but was afraid "it would take away my soul." At that time she was the lead singer with an integrated rock band which did only live performances. "I enjoy performing and I thought the opera would take that away from me. I was afraid to be trained. But someone gave me a scholarship and so I started training with great fear and then I started liking it." Six months after taking her first lesson she started giving recitals. Douglas later won a scholarship to study operatic singing in Verona, Italy.
On the subject of opportunities for black actresses in Hollywood, Douglas said, "The opportunities are kind of few and far between" but all in all, "I feel very fortunate, lucky I got this part because the competition is rough for black women." In spite of the poor opportunities and the constant competition, Douglas dreams of the day when she can switch from comedy, in which she has had a spate of roles (Good Times, The Jeffersons, What's Happening!, et cetera), to drama. And because she takes "everything as a lesson," there is no doubt that this healthy attitude will help her grow artistically and financially as her star and that of her colleague, Sheila Anderson, ascends and lights up the Hollywood sky.
This article was originally published in the New York Amsterdam News in 1982.
Note: The New Odd Couple only lasted one season (1982-1983). According to the IMDB website, the last episode aired on May 26, 1983.
Sunday, October 21, 2012
Friday, October 19, 2012
Johnny Ray Rousseau's Mostly White World
Blackbird by Larry Duplechan (St. Martin's Press, 182 pp.)
While reading Blackbird, Larry Duplechan's second romantic gay comic novel, the term "crossover" kept springing to mind. It's obvious that Duplechan sees no value in writing about a totally or predominantly black milieu.
As in Eight Days a Week, the main character is Johnny Ray Rousseau, who is black and gay. However, this time we see him five years earlier when he was an 18-year-old high school student in a small Southern California town. We learn from the outset that "most of the black people live way out on the outskirts of town" (how convenient for Duplechan's storytelling purposes) and that at school "most of the black kids keep pretty much to themselves and the white kids to themselves."
Johnny Ray and Cherie Baker, a black girl who is in love with him, are the exceptions. All of their cronies, male and female, are white. And these cronies are a mixed bag. Johnny Ray's closest friend, Efrem Zimbalist Johnson, a latent homosexual, seems to delight in sneering at those he feels are his intellectual inferiors, especially the pretty boys. Another friend, Carolann Compton, has a split personality that changes at will.
Sad to say, the most interesting parts of the novel are its sex scenes: the heterosexual one, involving Cherie which introduces him to sex, without diminishing his gay feelings and the homosexual one with a young filmmaker named Marshall Two-Hawks McNeill, which, for Johnny Ray, is the most satisfying of the two liaisons.
Johnny Ray sees himself as a "boy nympho" (the correct word is satyr). Throughout Blackbird, he is constantly at war with his libido, worried that he might, as he puts it, "throw a rod" (have an erection) at inopportune moments. And when those moments occur, "I recite the Twenty-third Psalm to myself, very quickly." This obsession leads Johnny Ray to admit, with a bit of self-derision, that "I get an awful lot of hard-ons, and a pretty good percentage of them seem to end up in my right hand. In other words, I jerk off quite a lot which bothers me sometimes, like maybe I do it too much."
If Larry Duplechan were a much more careful writer, a lot of the inconsistencies that appear in Blackbird would have been greatly reduced, particularly the more obvious bits of information, some of it carryovers from the first book. For example, whatever happened to David, his younger brother, who because he was better-looking, played a significant role in how Johnny Ray viewed himself physically?: "I truly came to abhor my flat nose and (to me) overlarge lips,...." It seems that Johnny Ray has become an only child.
Elsewhere in Blackbird, Johnny Ray, in the first-person narrative, reveals that his father looks like Harry Belafonte, and that he has always had "sort of a crush on my dad. I mean, he's so strong and so very handsome." In another part of the book, he states that one particular guy didn't appeal to him because "he wasn't my type, which is blonde." I would have thought that his dad would be the prototype for Johnny Ray's attractions. After all, Belafonte is no blond. Interestingly, the father is completely absent from Eight Days a Week. Where was he?
And how, in a town with "a certain amount of racism," is it possible for his family to "go to the basically white Baptist church" while "[m]ost of the others go to the black church across town"? Johnny Ray explains it away by saying "we'd just as soon go to church in the neighborhood we live in." If only life were that simple, Johnny Ray.
Blackbird falls into that genre of gay literature known as the "coming-out novel," and carries with it the cliches found therein: the straight girl who tries to "cure" him, the parents who become distraught upon learning of his true nature,
et cetera. I think there is some merit to what writer Philip Lopate has said in the New York Times Book Review (October 5, 1986) about this genre: "...the coming out to one's parents scene is becoming an overworked convention in contemporary fiction."
It would be refreshing, for a change, if Duplechan stopped trying to be an assimilationist, and took pride in being of African descent. "I do not see," says Nigerian writer and 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature laureate Wole Soyinka, "how any writer, any artist in fact, can fail to be identified with his sources, with the origin of his inspiration." (The New York Times Book Review, June 23, 1985).
This article was originally published in The New York Student, a City University of New York publication (Summer 1987).
While reading Blackbird, Larry Duplechan's second romantic gay comic novel, the term "crossover" kept springing to mind. It's obvious that Duplechan sees no value in writing about a totally or predominantly black milieu.
As in Eight Days a Week, the main character is Johnny Ray Rousseau, who is black and gay. However, this time we see him five years earlier when he was an 18-year-old high school student in a small Southern California town. We learn from the outset that "most of the black people live way out on the outskirts of town" (how convenient for Duplechan's storytelling purposes) and that at school "most of the black kids keep pretty much to themselves and the white kids to themselves."
Johnny Ray and Cherie Baker, a black girl who is in love with him, are the exceptions. All of their cronies, male and female, are white. And these cronies are a mixed bag. Johnny Ray's closest friend, Efrem Zimbalist Johnson, a latent homosexual, seems to delight in sneering at those he feels are his intellectual inferiors, especially the pretty boys. Another friend, Carolann Compton, has a split personality that changes at will.
Sad to say, the most interesting parts of the novel are its sex scenes: the heterosexual one, involving Cherie which introduces him to sex, without diminishing his gay feelings and the homosexual one with a young filmmaker named Marshall Two-Hawks McNeill, which, for Johnny Ray, is the most satisfying of the two liaisons.
Johnny Ray sees himself as a "boy nympho" (the correct word is satyr). Throughout Blackbird, he is constantly at war with his libido, worried that he might, as he puts it, "throw a rod" (have an erection) at inopportune moments. And when those moments occur, "I recite the Twenty-third Psalm to myself, very quickly." This obsession leads Johnny Ray to admit, with a bit of self-derision, that "I get an awful lot of hard-ons, and a pretty good percentage of them seem to end up in my right hand. In other words, I jerk off quite a lot which bothers me sometimes, like maybe I do it too much."
If Larry Duplechan were a much more careful writer, a lot of the inconsistencies that appear in Blackbird would have been greatly reduced, particularly the more obvious bits of information, some of it carryovers from the first book. For example, whatever happened to David, his younger brother, who because he was better-looking, played a significant role in how Johnny Ray viewed himself physically?: "I truly came to abhor my flat nose and (to me) overlarge lips,...." It seems that Johnny Ray has become an only child.
Elsewhere in Blackbird, Johnny Ray, in the first-person narrative, reveals that his father looks like Harry Belafonte, and that he has always had "sort of a crush on my dad. I mean, he's so strong and so very handsome." In another part of the book, he states that one particular guy didn't appeal to him because "he wasn't my type, which is blonde." I would have thought that his dad would be the prototype for Johnny Ray's attractions. After all, Belafonte is no blond. Interestingly, the father is completely absent from Eight Days a Week. Where was he?
And how, in a town with "a certain amount of racism," is it possible for his family to "go to the basically white Baptist church" while "[m]ost of the others go to the black church across town"? Johnny Ray explains it away by saying "we'd just as soon go to church in the neighborhood we live in." If only life were that simple, Johnny Ray.
Blackbird falls into that genre of gay literature known as the "coming-out novel," and carries with it the cliches found therein: the straight girl who tries to "cure" him, the parents who become distraught upon learning of his true nature,
et cetera. I think there is some merit to what writer Philip Lopate has said in the New York Times Book Review (October 5, 1986) about this genre: "...the coming out to one's parents scene is becoming an overworked convention in contemporary fiction."
It would be refreshing, for a change, if Duplechan stopped trying to be an assimilationist, and took pride in being of African descent. "I do not see," says Nigerian writer and 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature laureate Wole Soyinka, "how any writer, any artist in fact, can fail to be identified with his sources, with the origin of his inspiration." (The New York Times Book Review, June 23, 1985).
This article was originally published in The New York Student, a City University of New York publication (Summer 1987).
Thursday, October 18, 2012
An Escort In Tangiers
Hello Darling, Are You Working? by Rupert Everett (William Morrow & Co., paperback, 240 pp.)
If you're an aficionado of high camp, which I'm not, then film actor Rupert Everett's comic first novel, Hello Darling, Are You Working?, will probably be a welcome addition to your library. For me, the humor, British in this case, elicited not one laugh. It just went right past me.
Hello Darling, Are You Working? takes place mostly in Paris. The protagonist is Rhys Waveral, an out-of-work British actor who once starred in an American soap opera. When Rhys, who goes by a number of names (Dorita, Wavy, et al.), depending on his mood and/or situation, loses all of his money in the 1987 stock market crash, he finds he has no other alternative to paying his enormous hotel suite bill but to turn to prostitution. Enter Mrs. Rikki Lancaster, a rich American widow "dressed to the hilt,...in her hallmark turban and cape and liberally splattered with chunky jewellery" and her sidekick, Miss Elida Schumann. Mrs. Lancaster over lunch offers to pay Rhys $100,000 to escort her to a costume party in Tangiers, Morocco--$50,000 upfront, the rest after they have done "the deed" (have sex) following the festivities. Rhys reluctantly agrees to the assignment or, in this case, assignation.
At the party in Tangiers, hosted by a flaming queen from the American Deep South, Ashby Montgomery de la Zouche, an interior decorator, Rhys dresses up as a fruit plate, a costume that takes him "almost as long to get out of" as it does "to get into...."
The other bizarre characters include: Peach Delight, a gorgeous transvestite who speaks in pidgin English ("You Rhys father? I Peach. I friend of Rhys."), Maurice Goodbuns, an aging actor who Rhys encounters on the streets of Tangiers disguised as a beggar, and Dim (the Brigidier) Waveral, Rhys's blustering father, who constantly berates (with glee) Rhys.
Divided into three acts like a stage play, Hello Darling, Are You Working? is liberally and wonderfully illustrated by Frances Crichton Stuart. The pictures are like the black-and-white, pen-and-ink drawings found in a children's storybook. At the beginning of each chapter there is a headnote that summarizes the action therein.
Although Rhys is supposed to be a gay man, there is very little in the book to suggest this, which is another reason I found Hello Darling, Are You Working? of no significance to me as a reader or to gay literature in general. There are so much hijinks going on that the reader becomes exhausted and loses the thread of the story. The question arises: What is the point of it all?
This article was originally published in the Lambda Book Report (November/December 1992).
If you're an aficionado of high camp, which I'm not, then film actor Rupert Everett's comic first novel, Hello Darling, Are You Working?, will probably be a welcome addition to your library. For me, the humor, British in this case, elicited not one laugh. It just went right past me.
Hello Darling, Are You Working? takes place mostly in Paris. The protagonist is Rhys Waveral, an out-of-work British actor who once starred in an American soap opera. When Rhys, who goes by a number of names (Dorita, Wavy, et al.), depending on his mood and/or situation, loses all of his money in the 1987 stock market crash, he finds he has no other alternative to paying his enormous hotel suite bill but to turn to prostitution. Enter Mrs. Rikki Lancaster, a rich American widow "dressed to the hilt,...in her hallmark turban and cape and liberally splattered with chunky jewellery" and her sidekick, Miss Elida Schumann. Mrs. Lancaster over lunch offers to pay Rhys $100,000 to escort her to a costume party in Tangiers, Morocco--$50,000 upfront, the rest after they have done "the deed" (have sex) following the festivities. Rhys reluctantly agrees to the assignment or, in this case, assignation.
At the party in Tangiers, hosted by a flaming queen from the American Deep South, Ashby Montgomery de la Zouche, an interior decorator, Rhys dresses up as a fruit plate, a costume that takes him "almost as long to get out of" as it does "to get into...."
The other bizarre characters include: Peach Delight, a gorgeous transvestite who speaks in pidgin English ("You Rhys father? I Peach. I friend of Rhys."), Maurice Goodbuns, an aging actor who Rhys encounters on the streets of Tangiers disguised as a beggar, and Dim (the Brigidier) Waveral, Rhys's blustering father, who constantly berates (with glee) Rhys.
Divided into three acts like a stage play, Hello Darling, Are You Working? is liberally and wonderfully illustrated by Frances Crichton Stuart. The pictures are like the black-and-white, pen-and-ink drawings found in a children's storybook. At the beginning of each chapter there is a headnote that summarizes the action therein.
Although Rhys is supposed to be a gay man, there is very little in the book to suggest this, which is another reason I found Hello Darling, Are You Working? of no significance to me as a reader or to gay literature in general. There are so much hijinks going on that the reader becomes exhausted and loses the thread of the story. The question arises: What is the point of it all?
This article was originally published in the Lambda Book Report (November/December 1992).
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Choreographer Garth Fagan, An Artist Who Happens To Be Black
Reading through the dance reviews about Garth Fagan's Bucket Dance Theatre, you come across such comments as "And though most of the dancers are black, the movement is in no way ethnic" (San Diego Union). After awhile you begin to wonder if that's why the white critics are so enthralled with Fagan's choreography. (Although it's hard to see how the Union critic came to his conclusion, since a dance like "Time After Before Place" has an unmistakable Caribbean motif, including the carnivalesque costumes.)
I saw the Bucket Dance Theatre perform at the Joyce Theatre during the first week of a two-week engagement (their run ends November 13 [1988].) And though I acknowledged the skill of the dancers and the intricacy of the choreography put on them by Fagan, these gymnastic feats left me virtually unmoved. In fact, the audience that night showed more enthusiasm than I did. At the root of my attitude is the fact that Fagan, to quote the critic from San Diego, "never imposes ideas and issues upon the dance material." My preference is for dance-drama, not abstract movement.
Strangely, Fagan, a native of Jamaica, with roots in Afro-Caribbean dance (as a teenager he danced with the Jamaican National Dance Theatre) told the Los Angeles Times critic that he prefers to be known as "an artist who happens to be black." But then again, maybe it isn't so strange. Langston Hughes, in his famous 1926 essay, "The Negro and the Racial Mountain," spoke about a young black poet who told Hughes that he wanted to be known as "a poet--not a Negro poet." Hughes warned us against those artists who harbor "the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible."
That's why I have a tremendous amount of respect and affection for Kevin Jeff and his [Brooklyn-based] Jubilation! Dance Company. They make no apology for who and what they are. I just wish other dancers and choreographers felt the same way.
This item, which appeared in a dance column I wrote for the New York Amsterdam News, was published January 28, 1989.
I saw the Bucket Dance Theatre perform at the Joyce Theatre during the first week of a two-week engagement (their run ends November 13 [1988].) And though I acknowledged the skill of the dancers and the intricacy of the choreography put on them by Fagan, these gymnastic feats left me virtually unmoved. In fact, the audience that night showed more enthusiasm than I did. At the root of my attitude is the fact that Fagan, to quote the critic from San Diego, "never imposes ideas and issues upon the dance material." My preference is for dance-drama, not abstract movement.
Strangely, Fagan, a native of Jamaica, with roots in Afro-Caribbean dance (as a teenager he danced with the Jamaican National Dance Theatre) told the Los Angeles Times critic that he prefers to be known as "an artist who happens to be black." But then again, maybe it isn't so strange. Langston Hughes, in his famous 1926 essay, "The Negro and the Racial Mountain," spoke about a young black poet who told Hughes that he wanted to be known as "a poet--not a Negro poet." Hughes warned us against those artists who harbor "the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible."
That's why I have a tremendous amount of respect and affection for Kevin Jeff and his [Brooklyn-based] Jubilation! Dance Company. They make no apology for who and what they are. I just wish other dancers and choreographers felt the same way.
This item, which appeared in a dance column I wrote for the New York Amsterdam News, was published January 28, 1989.
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
African Influence In The Americas
Since its inception in 1976, the Caribbean Cultural Center in Manhattan, along with numerous other black institutions, has been continuing the battle against the centuries-old myth that blacks have had nothing of value culturally or intellectually to offer the New World. The center has been doing this by researching and identifying African continuities and retentions, and showing their impact on general society.
The center, the brainchild of Marta Moreno Vega, a New York-born Puerto Rican and its executive director, grew out of a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship she received in 1975 to find out about various art collections that had been properly identified, as well as find out their location. At that time, Ms. Vega, a former art education teacher in the New York City public school system, was director of El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem and needed the information in order for the art objects to "make any sense."
She had no intention of starting an institution when she got the first of two six-month fellowships. But her difficulties in tracking down and identifying collections made it clear that a center was needed to make these publicly inaccessible artworks available for scholarly examination. It became necessary for her to travel throughout the Caribbean and Bahia, Brazil to see what other institutions were doing so that she could decide what she would do differently. She learned that local institutions focused only on the history and culture of their particular geographic area and that "[n]one of them brought the cultures together and explored their relationship and commonalities and their differences."
It became apparent to Ms. Vega that such a center would be a unique cultural treasure chest to scholars and laymen alike. As it turned out, scholars and researchers were very receptive to the idea because, she said, they "felt there had to be some kind of institutional vehicle that would bring this information to the foreground."
When she was asked how strong the African influence in the Americas has been, Ms. Vega replied: "It's pervasive. You see it in terms of instruments in orchestras, in terms of clothing style, in terms of foods. The Afro-American community is clearly becoming the majority culture. When you have a majority culture, you have food, clothes, art forms that are expressive of [that] culture. We have to be very clear that the influence and impact is there." Although the African cultural influence in the Americas is "very much intact," she continued, "the media doesn't focus on it and when [the media] does [they present this influence as coming from] primitive cultures. And derogatory terms makes us turn away [from that influence] or say it's not there."
The Caribbean Cultural Center, newly located in a narrow, four-story building near St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital on the West Side of Manhattan receives about 60 to 65 people a day. The support and attendance from the black community, said Ms. Vega, "has been very good. We get increasingly more pleased, more committed to what we're doing because the audience represents black people from all cultures."
The center plans to have an enclosed tropical garden in the backyard so that children can see the various kinds of "plants and vegetation that grows in the Caribbean." Also planned is the completion of fourth-floor remodeling work. This is where all audio-visual documentation of center activities will be made accessible to students and researchers.
When storage space for the audio-visual materials runs out, the center will donate to the New York Public Library's Schomburg Collection or some other library those materials no longer needed.
According to Ms. Vega, the center has developed a five-year plan and is "looking for those kinds of activities and art forms that [will] fit into the development of that plan," a sort of blueprint detailing the center's direction and aesthetic definition. She pointed out that in the search for "the broader impact of African cultures in the Americas," they would like to "move into Panama and Colombia and other areas where black continuities are."
This article was originally published in the Harlem Weekly newspaper in 1983.
Note: The Caribbean Cultural Center, in 2012 or 2013, plans to leave its 58th Street location and move to its new home, an abandoned firehouse on 125th Street in East Harlem, just steps from the Metro North and Lexington Avenue train stations.
The center, the brainchild of Marta Moreno Vega, a New York-born Puerto Rican and its executive director, grew out of a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship she received in 1975 to find out about various art collections that had been properly identified, as well as find out their location. At that time, Ms. Vega, a former art education teacher in the New York City public school system, was director of El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem and needed the information in order for the art objects to "make any sense."
She had no intention of starting an institution when she got the first of two six-month fellowships. But her difficulties in tracking down and identifying collections made it clear that a center was needed to make these publicly inaccessible artworks available for scholarly examination. It became necessary for her to travel throughout the Caribbean and Bahia, Brazil to see what other institutions were doing so that she could decide what she would do differently. She learned that local institutions focused only on the history and culture of their particular geographic area and that "[n]one of them brought the cultures together and explored their relationship and commonalities and their differences."
It became apparent to Ms. Vega that such a center would be a unique cultural treasure chest to scholars and laymen alike. As it turned out, scholars and researchers were very receptive to the idea because, she said, they "felt there had to be some kind of institutional vehicle that would bring this information to the foreground."
When she was asked how strong the African influence in the Americas has been, Ms. Vega replied: "It's pervasive. You see it in terms of instruments in orchestras, in terms of clothing style, in terms of foods. The Afro-American community is clearly becoming the majority culture. When you have a majority culture, you have food, clothes, art forms that are expressive of [that] culture. We have to be very clear that the influence and impact is there." Although the African cultural influence in the Americas is "very much intact," she continued, "the media doesn't focus on it and when [the media] does [they present this influence as coming from] primitive cultures. And derogatory terms makes us turn away [from that influence] or say it's not there."
The Caribbean Cultural Center, newly located in a narrow, four-story building near St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital on the West Side of Manhattan receives about 60 to 65 people a day. The support and attendance from the black community, said Ms. Vega, "has been very good. We get increasingly more pleased, more committed to what we're doing because the audience represents black people from all cultures."
The center plans to have an enclosed tropical garden in the backyard so that children can see the various kinds of "plants and vegetation that grows in the Caribbean." Also planned is the completion of fourth-floor remodeling work. This is where all audio-visual documentation of center activities will be made accessible to students and researchers.
When storage space for the audio-visual materials runs out, the center will donate to the New York Public Library's Schomburg Collection or some other library those materials no longer needed.
According to Ms. Vega, the center has developed a five-year plan and is "looking for those kinds of activities and art forms that [will] fit into the development of that plan," a sort of blueprint detailing the center's direction and aesthetic definition. She pointed out that in the search for "the broader impact of African cultures in the Americas," they would like to "move into Panama and Colombia and other areas where black continuities are."
This article was originally published in the Harlem Weekly newspaper in 1983.
Note: The Caribbean Cultural Center, in 2012 or 2013, plans to leave its 58th Street location and move to its new home, an abandoned firehouse on 125th Street in East Harlem, just steps from the Metro North and Lexington Avenue train stations.
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
"The Block," A Play About Inner City Family Life
The Block, written by Earl A. Johnson and directed by Hamid Fardjad, ran for a month [October 28-November 20, 1983] at the Actor's Outlet Theatre on West 28th Street [in Manhattan]. It concerned itself with the problems faced by inner city black teenagers from the perspective of three families: a single, alcoholic mother on welfare who wants her daughter to quit high school and find a job; a stable but overly protective and inquisitive single mother who wants to meet her daughter's "little male friends," and a two-parent home where there are four teenagers present. Three of the four kids are problems. One daughter is pregnant, one son is involved in drug-dealing, and another son is consistently absent from school in order to pursue a boxing career.
Although many of the cast members were in group foster care, The Block did not specifically deal with foster care, only the problems that could cause a child to be placed by the authorities in an environment outside of the family unit. The play made the point that these problems can and do take place in any type of family setting. (It should also be pointed out that a child can be placed in foster care for reasons other than parental neglect and/or child abuse.)
The issues raised by the play were ones many adolescents would readily identify with: the lack of parent-child communication, teenage pregnancy, juvenile delinquency, the monetary lure of drug peddling, the struggle to prepare oneself for the adult world, racism, et cetera.
The Block, based on the experiences and thoughts of its 12 non-professional teenage actors, did not try to arrive at any simplistic solutions. Its goal was to present, in dramatic form, the reality of the streets and of home life for many kids in urban neighborhoods and to give us food for thought and discussion.
"Some grownups can learn something from it [the play], too," said 19-year-old Margaret M., a cast member who was working as a nurse's aide, "because there's some parents who act like [the parents in the play] toward their teenagers and there are some teenagers who don't listen to what their parents say. It is not only for the teenagers to learn something from the play, it's also good for some of the grownups to understand their kids better."
One interesting aspect of the play was the pairing of professional actors with non pros. Although it was easy to tell who was a pro and who was not by the quality of the acting, that in no way took anything away from the impact of the scenes or their message.
All that the participants asked the audience to do was come to the theatre with open minds and to check their negative thoughts about inner city life at the door.
The Block was conceived through improvisation, and was sponsored by the New York City Human Resources Administration's Office of Direct Child Care Services.
This article was originally published in the Harlem Weekly newspaper in 1983.
Although many of the cast members were in group foster care, The Block did not specifically deal with foster care, only the problems that could cause a child to be placed by the authorities in an environment outside of the family unit. The play made the point that these problems can and do take place in any type of family setting. (It should also be pointed out that a child can be placed in foster care for reasons other than parental neglect and/or child abuse.)
The issues raised by the play were ones many adolescents would readily identify with: the lack of parent-child communication, teenage pregnancy, juvenile delinquency, the monetary lure of drug peddling, the struggle to prepare oneself for the adult world, racism, et cetera.
The Block, based on the experiences and thoughts of its 12 non-professional teenage actors, did not try to arrive at any simplistic solutions. Its goal was to present, in dramatic form, the reality of the streets and of home life for many kids in urban neighborhoods and to give us food for thought and discussion.
"Some grownups can learn something from it [the play], too," said 19-year-old Margaret M., a cast member who was working as a nurse's aide, "because there's some parents who act like [the parents in the play] toward their teenagers and there are some teenagers who don't listen to what their parents say. It is not only for the teenagers to learn something from the play, it's also good for some of the grownups to understand their kids better."
One interesting aspect of the play was the pairing of professional actors with non pros. Although it was easy to tell who was a pro and who was not by the quality of the acting, that in no way took anything away from the impact of the scenes or their message.
All that the participants asked the audience to do was come to the theatre with open minds and to check their negative thoughts about inner city life at the door.
The Block was conceived through improvisation, and was sponsored by the New York City Human Resources Administration's Office of Direct Child Care Services.
This article was originally published in the Harlem Weekly newspaper in 1983.
Saturday, October 6, 2012
Two Actors, Few Props, No Scenery
For its second season, Rainbow Repertory Theatre will present January 6-21 [1989] Philip Blackwell's Twoheads, a theatre piece for two actors, at the Alonzo Players Theatre, 317 Clermont Avenue, Brooklyn.
Originally commissioned in 1983 by John W. M. Neeley, a black art gallery owner in New York, Twoheads, in its diversity of themes and characters, has something of interest for almost everybody. The ten vignettes--some humorous, some serious--explore such issues as torture in South Africa, intergenerational romance, sexism, and homosexuality.
The production, directed by Rainbow Rep's artistic director Reginald T. Jackson, is not only a challenge to the actors, Raan Lewis and Bryan D. Webster, who must play a multitude of roles, but also to its audience who are required to use their imaginations since there are few props and no scenery. "Theatre happens," explained playwright Blackwell, in an interview I did with him for the New York Native, "somewhere between you and the actor. You ought to participate in theatre. Not like film where you can sit there and it sort of does it to you. It's very passive. Theatre's not like that. In theatre there's 'suspension of disbelief.' You say, 'I'm not in this big room with this woman kicking me in my chair. I'm on this beach with these people. Once you do that you hear the surf. It's not there, but that's what happens."
Blackwell admits that "some of the pieces are more successful than others, of course. The piece, 'Herbert, Look,' is about a black gay man and his black lesbian friend who commit illegal acts on a billboard in San Francisco."
While waiting for a bus to take them to see a Busby Berkeley movie, Laurie calls to Herbert's attention the "offensive" billboard. Herbert, with a shrug, can't see "what's so terrible" about a black woman appearing in a liquor ad bearing the slogan "Have you ever tasted Black Velvet?" Laurie heatedly replies, "How can you look at it and not see that it's a terrible ripoff of women? And in this case, a ripoff of black women?" She decides, to Herbert's dismay, to take "direct action"--with spray paint.
"Herbert, Look," continued Blackwell, "comes out of an aborted play I tried to write and which had never gone anywhere for me. To be honest, it works better as a piece in Twoheads than it would have worked as a play.
"'Brother, It's Good to See You' is the South African piece that was also very successful. It comes out of a combination of my continuing concern with what's going on in South Africa, what that means to me as a black man in America, and some specific things that I read."
Samuel, a victim of police torture, tells his friend Frederick of his experience: "If you'd seen what I've seen. We were in cells only this high. You couldn't lie out, you couldn't stand up... And hot. And no water...And the torture rooms...We could hear the screams. Then silence. Then screams again. They would come to the cell and pound on the door. And laugh. They would say, 'Come on, you're next.' And then...nothing would happen. They would go away."
Twoheads is part of Rainbow Rep's continuing effort to promote the work of gay and lesbian playwrights of color, with the added aim of presenting positive and inspiring images, especially to gay youth, who will be provided free admission.
This article was originally published in the New York Amsterdam News (January 21, 1989).
Note: See blog post published on April 3, 2012 for an interview with the late Philip Blackwell.
Originally commissioned in 1983 by John W. M. Neeley, a black art gallery owner in New York, Twoheads, in its diversity of themes and characters, has something of interest for almost everybody. The ten vignettes--some humorous, some serious--explore such issues as torture in South Africa, intergenerational romance, sexism, and homosexuality.
The production, directed by Rainbow Rep's artistic director Reginald T. Jackson, is not only a challenge to the actors, Raan Lewis and Bryan D. Webster, who must play a multitude of roles, but also to its audience who are required to use their imaginations since there are few props and no scenery. "Theatre happens," explained playwright Blackwell, in an interview I did with him for the New York Native, "somewhere between you and the actor. You ought to participate in theatre. Not like film where you can sit there and it sort of does it to you. It's very passive. Theatre's not like that. In theatre there's 'suspension of disbelief.' You say, 'I'm not in this big room with this woman kicking me in my chair. I'm on this beach with these people. Once you do that you hear the surf. It's not there, but that's what happens."
Blackwell admits that "some of the pieces are more successful than others, of course. The piece, 'Herbert, Look,' is about a black gay man and his black lesbian friend who commit illegal acts on a billboard in San Francisco."
While waiting for a bus to take them to see a Busby Berkeley movie, Laurie calls to Herbert's attention the "offensive" billboard. Herbert, with a shrug, can't see "what's so terrible" about a black woman appearing in a liquor ad bearing the slogan "Have you ever tasted Black Velvet?" Laurie heatedly replies, "How can you look at it and not see that it's a terrible ripoff of women? And in this case, a ripoff of black women?" She decides, to Herbert's dismay, to take "direct action"--with spray paint.
"Herbert, Look," continued Blackwell, "comes out of an aborted play I tried to write and which had never gone anywhere for me. To be honest, it works better as a piece in Twoheads than it would have worked as a play.
"'Brother, It's Good to See You' is the South African piece that was also very successful. It comes out of a combination of my continuing concern with what's going on in South Africa, what that means to me as a black man in America, and some specific things that I read."
Samuel, a victim of police torture, tells his friend Frederick of his experience: "If you'd seen what I've seen. We were in cells only this high. You couldn't lie out, you couldn't stand up... And hot. And no water...And the torture rooms...We could hear the screams. Then silence. Then screams again. They would come to the cell and pound on the door. And laugh. They would say, 'Come on, you're next.' And then...nothing would happen. They would go away."
Twoheads is part of Rainbow Rep's continuing effort to promote the work of gay and lesbian playwrights of color, with the added aim of presenting positive and inspiring images, especially to gay youth, who will be provided free admission.
This article was originally published in the New York Amsterdam News (January 21, 1989).
Note: See blog post published on April 3, 2012 for an interview with the late Philip Blackwell.
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