It’s pronounced Pearly.
That was not obvious to me at first.
The atmosphere at the invited dress rehearsal was like a party on Wednesday night as Leslie “Aaron Burr” Odom returned to Broadway in a play that has itself not been on Broadway since 1961.
Purlie Victorious is a farcical slap-stick comedy set in the Jim Crow south – on a cotton plantation. Dangerous territory for a comedy, perhaps more than ever, I was thinking as we lined up outside waiting to be let in to the last “rehearsal” before previews begin. It quickly became apparent as the show began that now more than ever, maybe we need to laugh about race in America. Well, not “laugh about race” like that but rather in a laugh-or-cry way – as in blow off a little steam.
Beloved American actor Ossie Davis wrote the play, and it was made a musical in the 70’s which has some perspective theater goers confused about why Leslie Odom would be in the non-musical version.
This is not the musical.
But it is spectacularly funny. Was the play ahead of its time, or have times changed not-at-all? Maybe a bit of both. The character of Purlie is a preacher who is trying to get $500 back from the prideful confederate plantation owner so he can buy a church nearby and well, preach.
The play completely immerses the audience in Black southern life from over a hundred years ago. This entirely Black perspective on this terrible chapter… make that chapters, of American history works in a way that more recent writing about racial injustice in America doesn’t always. White America lurks outside their door like a foreign and terrible monster that can strike at any time, like the Captain’s bull whip that hangs upstage as a constant reminder that the laughter may be over at any point. The laughs do in fact subside for moments of reckoning making them all the more poignant. That’s what Davis’ play does best – it walks right to the edge of that darkness but doesn’t quite cross it, and the message comes through the comedy even more powerfully than drama might.
There were times I wasn’t sure I should even be laughing at some of the gallows humor on display here, being as terribly white as I am, and that’s what makes the play really speak, and that’s what makes it work today, sixty-two years after it debuted. Context – a sixty-year-old farce about the horrors of slavery originally written and starring Black theatre makers in the 60’s, presented to a mixed-race American audience that is likely as progressive as can be. But we live in a time where we feel that undertow of racism pull us backward and many of us feel uncertain what we can do about it.
Shout outs –
The entire cast is on fire, and under Kenny Leon’s leadership as director they find every nuance within the material. Leslie Odom Jr. is smooth as a fresh jar of Skippy as the verbose, magnetic preacher struggling with a rage that burns within him. Kara Young as the ingenue Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins brings I Love Lucy level shenanigans to the stage in a performance that is guaranteed to get her another Tony nomination. And a special nod to Jay O. Sanders who has the unenviable task of playing the slaver confederate Ol’ Captain Cotchippe and adroitly side steps all the easy tropes of playing a blistering racist southerner and hones a kind of passive racism and ignorance that is infuriatingly recognizable.
Get tickets now because word is getting out already and the reviews are going to be stellar.
