Charles Randolph-Wright speaks on stage at “Motown: The Musical” on April 30, 2015, in Hollywood. Credit: Rich Polk/Getty Images for Hollywood Pantages
Here, Randolph-Wright shares his thoughts on the heroes who gave him permission to forge his own creative path.
Frederick Douglass is famous in history for being an abolitionist leader and visionary. Although his life and writings are often taught about, his journey to becoming the icon that he was is not often discussed or shown.
The new musical at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage, “American Prophet: Frederick Douglass in His Own Words,” seeks to explore the details of Douglass’s life from illiterate slave to a prominent national figure, with a focus on his evolution as a man and abolitionist.
“American Prophet” came to be when director Charles Randolph-Wright went to Nashville, Tenn. to meet songwriter Marcus Hummon and hear some songs he had written as part of a project he was working on about Frederick Douglass. From the very first song, the music blew Randolph-Wright away.
“I thought this is the way to tell this story right now because music does something that nothing else can do,” he said. “Music can heal. Music gives a different voice to things literally. And so I knew ‘wow. This is the way to tell the story right now.’”
The storyline will focus on Douglass’s growth as a person, writer, and prominent figure. It describes his struggle with taking up the mantle and becoming the person, or prophet, so many around him wanted him to be.
“It’s the younger Frederick, who had to discover who he was, how to do this, what is that,” said Randolph-Wright. “Music allows that, so it’s such a great way to get inside of him, to have him question, to have him wonder.”
It was important to Randolph-Wright that the audience gets to see Douglass differently than the white-haired statesman that is often depicted in photos of him.
“You get to see a journey of him questioning himself,” he said. “He’s on this pedestal for all of us, so you get to step up with him or he gets to step down with you. Whatever that is, you get to get inside of his journey.”
The show also highlights Douglass’s partnership with his wife, who was a huge part in his success, and someone typically kept in the periphery. Randolph-Wright was able to talk to some descendants of Frederick and Anna, who helped him learn more about Anna, since there is very little written about her.
“As is often the case with women and women in the movement, they’re not heard, they’re not seen and and there’s very little written about [Anna], so this musical allowed us to give her a voice and a musical voice, a physical voice,” said Randolph-Wright.
Kristolyn Lloyd, who plays Anna, is a stage and TV actress from the suburbs of Houston. She won both an Emmy and a Grammy for her performance in Dear Evan Hansen on Broadway. In addition to her role on Broadway, she has credits for many off-Broadway performances, and TV credits on shows such as Elementary and Madam Secretary.
Playing the part of Frederick Douglass is Cornelius Smith Jr, who is an actor native to Detroit. He was nominated for a daytime Emmy for his role as Frankie Hubbard in the soap opera All My Children, and is most famous for portraying Marcus Walker on Scandal.
“American Prophet” is Randolph-Wright’s 12 production at Arena Stage. The show runs July 15 through August 28 in the Kreeger Theater. You can purchase tickets at https://tickets.arenastage.org/events/32349.
Not only sings, but dances, too. That dignified figure staring out of countless black-and-white images now moves to the beat of a score by Nashville-based country music composer Marcus Hummon. “Of course he danced!” declared the musical’s director and co-book writer, Charles Randolph-Wright. “I mean, he met his wife at a dance. He was fascinated by everything; he learned violin late in his life. He had that mind that did not stop, that inquisitive mind.”
“We wanted to humanize him, because he’s held up on this pedestal as this iconic figure from history,” Morris said in a Zoom interview. The scale and intensity of Douglass’s fame and advocacy were prodigious, particularly on the issue of ending slavery, but also on education, voting rights and equality for women. “I know, being in the family and also working with scholars that have researched my family,” Morris added, “that the stories about him that humanize him are just fantastic.”
It’s hard to imagine how the story of Douglass’s remarkable life and achievements — the escape from slavery and campaigning for emancipation, his careers as statesman and publisher, his peerless oratory — might be compressed into a couple of hours of exposition and song. Which also seems to have occurred to the creative team. They decided to narrow their focus to events in his biography leading up to the Civil War — a time Randolph-Wright calls Douglass’s “badass period, his activist period, his insurgent period, when he was in his 40s, when he was becoming the American prophet.”
For Hummon, a Grammy-winning songwriter who has composed for the likes of Tim McGraw, Wynonna Judd and the Dixie Chicks, it was the realization that Douglass’s own writings could propel the show’s melodies that cemented his creative path. “It ultimately was the poetry of his language that did it, that I started to hear music,” Hummon explained. “If you say, ‘It is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder,’ I mean, that’s verse. There are times when his oration and his writing simply shift in gear and become poetry.”
COURTESY OF TONY POWELL; WASHINGTON POST
Hummon had embarked on a modest song cycle about Douglass, after reading one of his three autobiographies that was performed at a Nashville church in the mid-2010s. “It was nice and I enjoyed it, but I kept reading and when I got to ‘Life and Times [of Frederick Douglass],’ then I was like, ‘Oh my God, there’s a huge story here,’ ” Hummon said. “I don’t know. I didn’t fully grasp it. And maybe I still don’t, still trying to, but I knew I needed help. I needed a writer-director to work with. And I had friends who said, ‘Yeah, we know who the guy is.’ ”
The narrative has been two-fold since Broadway returned in September, following an unprecedented 18-month shutdown: Broadway is back, but it’s also better.
These sentiments were underscored most visibly by something that had never happened before the 2021 season. The works of eight Black playwrights — alongside a community of predominantly Black directors, casts and crews — were going to be mounted across the nation’s largest theater district.
But tucked within the momentous celebration was an important question: Why hadn’t this happened yet?
While this type of question is frequently asked of the ceiling breakers, director Charles Randolph-Wright points to those who hold the answers — white counterparts and industry leaders who have historically had the power to remove the ceiling altogether for Black playwrights like Trouble in Mind’s Alice Childress.
“Ask them,” the director, writer and actor says. “Because we all did the work. We trained, we jumped through hoops. We did all the things you were supposed to do, and all too often, it did not happen.”
This experience of exclusion is among the many threads that link Randolph-Wright and Childress, two South Carolina-born artists and the creatives behind Roundabout Theater Company’s Broadway production of Trouble in Mind, which runs through Jan. 9 at the American Airlines Theatre.
When she was alive, Childress’ work never made the leap from Off-Broadway, where it debuted more than six decades ago. But the director, who first read the play while in college, says he shared her dream of telling this uncompromising story to a Broadway audience.
Ultimately, it would be not just the dream but Randolph-Wright’s unyielding tenacity — equal to that of the late playwright — that carried him through his 15-year quest to cement her in the Broadway canon and lexicon.
“Someone said that this was a lost classic,” Randolph-Wright recalls. “It wasn’t lost. Lost is when it’s in a drawer and someone doesn’t find it. It’s been there and regional theaters have performed it for years, but it’s never before gotten the acknowledgment of what a Broadway stamp does, what that pedigree does.”
Based on Childress’ own experiences with the theater, the show follows Black actress Wiletta Mayer (played by LaChanze) as she navigates the production of the anti-lynching play Chaos in Belleville alongside a mixed Black and white ensemble led by a white director. (In real life, Trouble in Mind‘s cast includes Jessica Frances Dukes, Don Stephenson, Simon Jones, Chuck Cooper, Michael Zegen, Alex Mickiewicz, Danielle Campbell and Brandon Micheal Hall alongside LaChanze — a company Randolph-Wright says “truly had the love for each other to be honest” and “brought the best to Alice’s words.”)
On stage, this show-within-a-show is pitched by its fictional white director as some newfangled look at racism in America, guaranteed to open the eyes and hearts of white audiences. But the disparaging treatment of Trouble in Mind’s fictional actors and the offensive representations they’ve been tasked with performing are a series of cuts for LaChanze’s Wiletta that eventually turn into a gaping wound.
No longer willing to settle personally or professionally, the actress demands the show’s Black company members be acknowledged in the creative process, risking her career and the entire show as she calls out the hypocrisy and racism of its white leadership.
“I directed it completely over the top because it is so wrong in how it is performed. The director in the play keeps saying to the actors, ‘I want you to be honest, I want the truth,’” Randolph-Wright says while recalling how he explained his directing approach to one of the actors. “I said, ‘You have to understand. That is his honesty, and that is his truth for Black characters to be so ridiculously stereotypical.’”
That sentiment is particularly striking after learning why Trouble in Mind hasn’t graced a Broadway stage before this fall. After opening on Off-Broadway in 1955, it was expected to debut in 1957. But white male producers asked the playwright, novelist and actress to tone down her story’s commentary about race.
Like her leading woman, Childress refused to censor herself — an act of bravery, notes Randolph-Wright — and so the dream of bringing her story, which deftly tackles racism, sexism, class and privilege in American theater, to Broadway’s stages was deferred. In this way, Trouble in Mind is a mirror for an industry the director says has given certain people “the entitlement and the privilege of saying, ‘I know better than you about who you are.’”
“They refused to put that on stage then, but people still have problems seeing that right now,” Randolph-Wright says. “I think it’s difficult because the people who control a lot of the work, I don’t think they want to put themselves up there on stage that way. So, bravo that Roundabout has placed this world on stage because it’s very accusatory of the whole system and speaks to how we change this system.”
It is all very meta, with no word changed in Childress’ script for its contemporary audience and nuanced helming from a director who says he has never had equity with his white peers. Randolph-Wright is also the first Black director LaChanze has had “in her 35-year career on Broadway in a leading role.”
“An actor was asking a question about the play being over the top, so I had every actor of color that day tell one story about a white director who told them how they should be Black,” Randolph-Wright says. “The youngest Black actor in this company, who has starred on a couple of television series and is in his 20s, even had this happen to him in the past few years.”
Trouble in Mind and this Broadway season, then, is not just a mirror. It’s a moment to splinter the past from the present for artists working at a time when, like the fictional play’s lead, “people have felt, ‘I am not doing this anymore. Some things will have to change.’”
“Who is designing the set of the house, who was putting them in the clothes, who is marketing the show? You may do this Black project, but you walk in the room and everyone who’s presenting this project — none of them look like you,” the director says of what inclusion has historically meant on Broadway. “So what has changed this season is that many people have received opportunities that they never received before.”
In Trouble in Mind, 12 performers and crew made their Broadway debut, including Black female lighting designer Kathy Perkins. She’s “worked all over the world,” including on Childress’ last show, Randolph-Wright says, but “never got her shot on Broadway before this year.” She’s now among less than a handful of Black lighting designers in the history of Broadway.
That shared experience across decades as Black artists “so used to not being seen and heard,” the director says, is why Childress’ work is so fortuitously fitting for Broadway’s current moment of self-reflection. While talks about the play’s Broadway debut with Roundabout had started years before the summer of 2020, it arrives amid a historic but deeply challenging time that could see artists’ work treated as both a pandemic test run and an indistinguishable creative mass.
“I didn’t want this play to be a knee-jerk reaction to last summer, for this to come out in the middle of all of this, on the front lines. I didn’t like the idea of, ‘Here we are again, a monolith,’” he says. “We were the canary thrown in. It was obvious to so many of us that this was the time but my fear was that if these plays failed, then they would say, ‘Well see? We tried.’”
And yet, the director concedes that Childress’ work may have debuted exactly when it needed to. Broadway seems finally ready to commit itself to the kind of creative authenticity and accountability Wiletta demands, thanks in no small part to this season’s swell of Black artists.
It’s a moment the director likens to the years following the 1918 influenza, which birthed the roaring ’20s and the Harlem Renaissance — a stark parallel that makes him wonder what theater’s renaissance will be after this pandemic. “Is this the beginning of that?” he asks.
If it is, it’s perhaps best illustrated not just by what’s happening on stage or behind the curtain but in front of it. Childress’ debut is among a collection of plays encouraging a shift in who makes up a “Broadway audience,” with Randolph-Wright calling responses to the play from Black students especially “breathtaking.” White viewers, he says, are changed, too.
“In 2019, the typical Broadway white audience would not have heard this play the same way they are hearing it now,” the director says. “Alice is getting her due at a time when people are realizing things they would not even think about before — that wasn’t even in their periphery.”
Few stars shone as brightly as Sidney Poitier.
In films like “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and “In the Heat of the Night,” Poitier turned in powerful performances that electrified audiences. He also broke racial barriers as a leading man and top box office draw in the 1950s and 1960s, and became the first African American male to win an Oscar for best actor for his performance in “Lilies of the Field.” Though best known for his film work in front of the camera, Poitier also became a director making hits such as “Stir Crazy.” On stage, he appeared in the first production of “A Raisin in the Sun.”
Now, Poitier’s legendary life as a performer, director, and activist will be dramatized in a new Broadway play that will be written by Charles Randolph-Wright and directed by Tony Award winner Ruben Santiago-Hudson. Titled “Sidney,” the show will trace Poitier’s youth on Cat Island in the Bahamas to his rise to become one of the world’s biggest stars. The play is being mounted with the support of the Poitier family, which selected both Randolph-Wright and Santiago-Hudson to write and direct the production. “Sidney” is produced by Ron Gillyard (“Born for This”); Poitier’s daughter, filmmaker Anika Poitier; and Barry Krost. The play is adapted from Poitier’s best-selling autobiography “The Measure of a Man.”
Randolph-Wright is the author of “Blue” and the upcoming “American Prophet: Frederick Douglass In His Own Words.” He is also the director of Roundabout Theatre Company’s critically acclaimed revival of Alice Childress’ “Trouble in Mind,” which opened on Broadway this fall.
Santiago-Hudson is also on Broadway this season as the author, director and star of “Lackawanna Blues.” He previously directed the Tony-winning Broadway premiere of August Wilson’s “Jitney” and will direct the upcoming Broadway premiere of Dominique Morisseau’s “Skeleton Crew.”
In a statement, Randoph-Wright said, “The first time I met Sidney Poitier was decades ago when he saw a show I co-wrote and directed in Los Angeles. We went to dinner and I literally could not speak. He said to me, ‘If in any way I have inspired you, you have more than paid me back with what I saw this evening.’ I have held onto those words my entire career. And now to place his astonishing life on stage is the ultimate challenge and the ultimate joy. To have the trust of Mr. Poitier and his family is one of the greatest gifts I have been given – what an honor to get to dramatize the true measure of this monumental man. I look forward to the world discovering the astounding person that is behind one of our most prodigious heroes, a man who continues to inspire.”
Santiago-Hudson added, “Sir Sidney Poitier is clearly one of the greatest actors in the history of cinema. His integrity and standard of excellence set the bar for generations to come. It is an honor to be a part of celebrating the incomparable Sidney Poitier’s monumental career in this play but also the man and his extraordinary life.”
The cast and creative team will be announced at a later date, as will a production timeline.
Charles Randolph-Wright has penned a new play about the life of activist and filmmaker Sidney Poitier.
The play, entitled “Sidney,” is based on Poitier’s autobiography “The Measure of a Man” and is currently in development. Ruben Santiago-Hudson is attached to direct, and producers include Ron Gillyard, Barry Krost and Poitier’s daughter, Anika Poitier.
Randolph-Wright, who recently directed the Broadway production of “Trouble in Mind,” was selected by Poitier’s family to write the play, according to a press release. Santiago-Hudson, also chosen by the family to helm the play, recently appeared in “Lackawanna Blues” on Broadway, and is directing the upcoming Broadway production of Dominique Morisseau’s “Skeleton Crew.”
Now 94 years old, Poitier was the first Black man to win the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1963. He is also a retired diplomat, having served as the Bahamian ambassador to Japan from 1997 to 2007 and simultaneously to UNESCO from 2002 to 2007. Poitier was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1968 and awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.
Joan Marcus
August Wilson is well remembered for remarking that Black theater is alive, vibrant, vital and unfunded — that commerce and a common racism had long held American theater hostage to a mediocrity of tastes. On Broadway last Thursday, where Alice Childress’ 1955 play “Trouble in Mind” opened 66 years late, American theater took an overdue, yet well-timed step toward revising what plays ought to be considered classics.
“Trouble in Mind,” starring LaChanze and directed by Charles Randolph-Wright, tells of Wiletta Mayer, a Black actress rehearsing a new anti-lynching play with an interracial company, written by a white author and led by a white director (Michael Zegen). Mayer’s discomfort with the play and its rehearsal surfaces a damning portrait of what it means to be Black in American theater.
A hit off-Broadway in 1955, “Trouble in Mind” was slated to become the first play by a Black female author on Broadway, but when Childress refused to tone down its anti-racist rhetoric, producers pulled the plug. Thursday evening, “Trouble in Mind” took its Broadway bow, untouched as Childress intended, for the first time.
“I want Alice to be in the canon, and now I know she will be,” director Randolph-Wright told Variety on opening night. “At first, I didn’t want the play to come now,” he said, noting that he’d been advocating for Roundabout Theatre Company, who mounts the play, to produce her work for decades. “I didn’t want it to be caught up in the moment, to be seen as knee-jerk. But I realized that people are actually listening to it differently. … This play is a love letter and a poison pill.”
Nearly every turn of phrase in “Trouble in Mind,” a breathtaking comedy-drama, falls as prophetic and damning for the small distance we’ve come since it was written. Willetta remarks that show business for actors of color is just a business; “colored folk ain’t in theater.” She tells a young actor to say he was in the last revival of “Porgy and Bess.” No one will know the difference. The play’s director, Al Manners, tells the actors not to think of themselves as Black, but people. And, in the end, as Wiletta rebels against the stereotypical characters he creates, Manners offers that the play is a lie, but the best one they’d get for years.
“If you only knew how many real-life experiences I’ve pulled on to play this role,” LaChanze told Variety after the show on Thursday. “My version of Al Manners is a combination of more than a few directors I’ve worked with. Those experiences are authentic, they’re real, and they’re part of what it means to make theater and be Black in this country.”
That “Trouble in Mind” makes it to Broadway this season is no accident, and it’s not simply a well-timed opportunity for a deserved Black playwright. Childress’ Broadway debut is the legacy of organizations like Black Theatre United, which this year partnered with Roundabout Theatre Company to forge a new canon by staging lesser-known Black plays. BTU was also founded by LaChanze, as well as theater legends like Norm Lewis, Vanessa Williams, Kenny Leon, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Allyson Tucker — all of whom were in the audience at the American Airlines Theatre on Thursday.
“Broadway isn’t coming back. It’s coming forward,” Williams, who’s been a Roundabout board member for eight years, told Variety. “There are no accidents here. … This play is part of an economic, social and artistic movement.”
“I’ve spent many of the past few months in rooms with producers,” she continued, noting BTU’s successful adoption of the New Deal for Broadway, which establishes industry-wide reforms. “And they’re eager for change, not just because they want it, but because they want to be known as a part of it, too.”
Kristolyn Lloyd and Cornelius Smith Jr. as Anna and Frederick Douglass in “American Prophet.” (Margot Schulman/Arena Stage)
Cornelius Smith Jr. as Frederick Douglass and Chris Roberts as John Brown in “American Prophet.” (Margot Schulman)
‘
