'Red Velvet' and 'Raisin in the Sun'

Credit goes, in large part, to the star power of actors Adrian Lester and Denzel Washington, who are giving high-wattage performances in Red Velvet and A Raisin in the Sun respectively. Credit also goes to the two courageous women who wrote these compelling dramas.

British actress-writer Lolita Chakrabarti, author of Red Velvet, was inspired by the little-known but compelling story of Ira Aldridge, the African-American actor. Aldridge was born in New York in 1807, at a time when America was still in the grips of slavery, and performance opportunities were close to nil for a young black actor. So Aldridge went to England in his late teens, toured the United Kingdom, and built a reputation as a fine classical actor. Then in 1833 — the year that slavery was abolished in the British colonies — Aldridge had his great chance. At age 26, he was asked at the last minute to replace the ailing Edmund Kean as Othello at Covent Garden in London.

The outcome was both monumental and catastrophic. By all accounts, the audiences found Aldridge’s performance thrilling. But the reviews were vicious, with racial slurs that are unprintable today. After two performances, the management closed the theater. Aldridge never acted again on a major London stage. Wounded yet undeterred, he toured Europe and Russia, to great acclaim, for the rest of his career. He died in Poland at 60, after finally playing Lear. He is the only actor of African descent to be honored with a bronze plaque at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon.

It took a decade to find a theater for her play, but Chakrabarti, like her protagonist, persevered. Red Velvet premiered at London’s Tricycle Theatre in October, 2012, and it is now playing at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn under Indhu Rubasingham’s fine direction.

With an ensemble of eight talented actors, Chakrabarti has created a taut meta-drama that focuses on the rehearsals leading up to the historic opening night of Othello in 1833. We watch the charismatic Aldridge (played by Adrian Lester, the playwright’s husband) as he introduces a newer, truer acting style to his fellow cast members, earning their admiration and inspiring them to new artistic heights. The results are transforming — but the racially biased reviews are devastating. The play’s penultimate scene finds Aldridge on his knees before his longtime friend and theater manager, begging him not to close the show. “Don’t let the theater go dark in my name,” Aldridge entreats him. “Where will I go? Who will employ me?” But to no avail. The next scene flashes forward three decades to an aged, delusional Aldridge at a performance of King Lear in Poland, on the eve of his death.

Like Aldridge, Adrian Lester is a skilled classical stage actor, playing Hamlet in Peter Brook’s 2000 production and Othello at the Royal National Theatre in 2012. But he’s had many more opportunities than his predecessor — witness his success on the popular British TV series Hustle, the American series Girlfriends, and the feature film Primary Colors. In Red Velvet, Lester plays Aldridge with a passion and insight that reflects his appreciation of his own career. As he said recently: “There are still parallels between Ira and any artist who feels outside the mainstream of society.”

Ongoing struggle

Meanwhile, across the Brooklyn Bridge on Broadway, another African-American is struggling for his identity — this time, in a play set a century later. You’d think that Lorraine Hansberry’s beloved 1959 American classic, A Raisin in the Sun, would need no introduction. Nevertheless, in a broad commemorative gesture, director Kenny Leon prefaces his loving production with lines of Langston Hughes’s poetry projected on the theater curtain and read over loudspeakers (in a taped recording made by the late Hansberry): “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up/Like a raisin in the sun?”

The Younger family’s struggle for a better life on the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s is as familiar as that of Willy Loman’s clan in Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Lena Younger, the family matriarch and cleaning lady by profession (a powerhouse LaTanya Richardson Jackson), lives in a tiny tenement apartment with her troubled son Walter (an affecting Denzel Washington) and his family, as well as Lena’s young daughter Beneatha (a feisty Anika Noni Rose).

Walter, who (in this production) is approaching 40, ekes out a meager living as a chauffeur to a rich white man, with no hope of advancement. He’s frustrated to the point of desperation. “I got to change my life. I’m choking to death!” he cries in the opening scene. But his dream — a risky investment in a liquor store with his friends — is met with disapproval and apprehension by both his mother and his wife Ruth (a stoical Sophie Okonedo), who is trying to survive for their young son’s sake. The ambitious young Beneatha, in contrast, has a concrete dream: to become a doctor.

Hope flashes before their eyes in the form of a $10,000 life insurance check (from Lena’s husband’s policy). Lena takes matters into her own hands and puts a third of the money down on a house — the family’s first — in an all-white neighborhood. She gives the other two-thirds for safekeeping to Walter, who immediately hands it over to one of his investment “partners.” The play then deals with the aftermath of Walter’s disastrous folly, and the family’s decision whether to move into a hostile white neighborhood or — given their fresh losses — stay where they are.

The play’s themes — the clash of generations, assimilation, racism, African-American identity — are brought to the surface with focus and force, thanks to Leon’s clear direction and the cast’s spirited portrayals. (For further development of Hansberry’s themes, see Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park, a 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning play). Denzel Washington, an actor of humanity and depth, brings compassion to the role of the flawed Walter (immortalized by Sidney Poitier in 1959) and gains our empathy despite his character’s follies. Walter’s final moments of newfound courage earn Washington a well-deserved standing ovation.

In his essay “Tragedy and the Common Man,” Arthur Miller reminds us that the struggle for one’s dignity is the noblest cause for any protagonist in our hostile modern world. Thanks go to playwrights Lolita Chakrabarti and Lorraine Hansberry and their inspired casts for reminding us how far we’ve come — and how far we have yet to go to preserve that “dream deferred."

(Photo above right: Denzel Washington and LaTanya Richardson Jackson in A Raisin in the Sun, photo by Brigitte Lacombe)