Kander & Ebb's "Scottsboro Boys' by PTC (5th review)

The challenge, triumphantly met by The Scottsboro Boys, is how to revisit one of the iconic travesties of 20th Century racial injustice without presenting this history through a lens of naturalist realism that fits what is a stark morality play. The 1930s events of nine black teenagers falsely accused and convicted of rape demands retelling, especially in this era when it is too often assumed that we are beyond race. Keeping this history present is essential when its legacy of continuing racism persists in the criminal justice system's administration of capital punishment, our "war on drugs" and in policing practices.

A contemporary audience also requires its theater to step beyond the past realist and agit-prop portrayals of this story, which became America's shame and an international cause célèbre. Thanks to a gutsy choice by the Philadelphia Theater Company, we have a production that's a league beyond the WPA Federal Theater Project presentations on the subject, as in They Shall Not Die (1934) by John Wexley.

Fortunately, this production has surfaced here after a too short run in New York in 2010.

Brechtian device

The theatrical power of the minstrel show framing worked successfully on many levels in The Scottsboro Boys. As a neo-Brechtian device it created a jarring dissonance, and audience disquietude at racial injustice, for example, as amplified by a shucking "I Never Done Nothin'" song and dance of the lead character, Haywood Patterson (the sterling Rodney Hicks).

The tap dance and song, "Electric Chair," a nightmare scene of the 12-year-old prisoner, Eugene Williams (played by the virtuoso 11-year-old, Nile Bullock) was perhaps the most horrific danse macabre ever staged. ("Oh, the juice runs through you/And you start to shake/It's a kind of tap dance/But you ain't awake.")

The production played with and off the structures of minstrelsy, exposing its own racism that American culture had too readily embraced before the 1960s. It implicated us, as the audience of a minstrel show on South Broad Street, as participants in a racist past and present.

Why not blackface?

My criticism with the minstrelsy device here is that it was often too tame, and the play didn't push it much further to heighten its impact of racism's destructiveness and inherent tragedy. I recall its potent employment by the Wooster Group in their production of Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones, where a Kate Valk in blackface portrayed a despotic, self-destructive Brutus Jones in a play that also mixed race and history. I'm told that the New York production of The Scottsboro Boys used minstrelsy's blackface, which has been inexplicably and unfortunately dropped from this touring production.

Yes, some of the history could have been more accurately portrayed: Samuel Leibowitz, the criminal defense trial lawyer, did risk his own life zealously advocating for them; Judge James E. Horton Jr. knowingly ended his judicial career by ordering a new trial; and the Communist Party early offered its critical support, bringing in Leibowitz and arranging for appellate counsel that secured precedent-making US Supreme Court reversals.

Nevertheless, this Scottsboro Boys, through its ironic minstrel medium, has honored the lives and histories of these youths and made a memorable work of art as their memorial.♦


To read another review by Marshall Ledger, click here.
To read another review by Jackie Atkins, click here.
To read anther review by Steve Cohen, click here.
To read another review by Dan Rottenberg, click here.