A week ago I was hanging out with some theater folks after a preview of Liberty City, and of course when you have a table of Tuna Tartare-eating thespians the convo always spins into what’s hot and who’s not [in theater]. And what we pulled to the center of the table for scrutiny that night was Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.  Not the performances [because I hear they rock], but the relevancy of black actors castas a southern family whose fortune was built on the backs of the enslaved. 

Now I’m an advocate for the restaging of the classics with what we call "color".   It provides opportunity and a chance to see if a classic truly passes the test of universality.  So yeh, I’m a little psyched when Phylicia Rashad takes on Big Momma in the Broadway version of Cat.  Not the case for my Tartare-eating friends.

Most of them couldn’t find the  logic in using black actors to play wealthy southerners who have black servants.  Well, I found the logic.   There were wealthy blacks in the south.   And, in antebellum days, some even owned land and slaves.  I’ve personally taken a peak at my family history, and slave-owning was dangling from our tree, and trust me, I searched under every bone and ash to make sure the enslaved was simply family… in a few cases, they were not.   I told my late-night thespians to muse over Toni Morrison’s LOVE or Edward Jones’ antebellum THE KNOWN WORLD, or the recent staging of Lydia Diamonds’ STICKFLY at the McCarter Theater—a play that shows a present-day wealthy black family in The Vineyard with live-in servitude and lots of drama.   I’m no where near a supporter of black wealth exploiting the black poor as means to garner wealth, but it’s a part of what’s real in the world [now more than ever].  And for me, that deserves story.

My thespian folk acquiesced after my suggestion of rethinking their complaint. [If you call ordering more chips and changing the subject acquiescence].  But a few did promise to consider extreme capitalism in our community and not toss away the notion that blacks can be wealthy and southern and single-minded on stage.  However, one particular short-froed thespian preferred a play where the story of the black bourgeoisie was written about just that, as opposed to black actors slipping into classic roles created by someone who saw blacks as musical backdrop [you know, sharecroppers singingfrom the fields]. Then, she gleamed as she bit into a chip, we’d have some real theater.