Toll the bell, Old Broadway. Times are changin’, gone are the days, and hallelujah! Purlie Victorious, the play fashioned by Ossie Davis as a spellbinding vehicle for himself and his wife, Ruby Dee, is back on Broadway after a mere 62 years.
Leslie Odom Jr. has stepped onto the pulpit occupied by Davis when the play was produced for the first (and only) time back in 1961. The Tony Award-winning actor from Hamilton joins forces with the deservedly red-hot director Kenny Leon to give new life to this wickedly satiric tale termed, in the publicity and advertising, “a Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch.”
Purlie Victorious, per the stage directions, takes place in “the recent past”—which was timely in 1961 and might be just as timely today. Purlie Victorious Judson (Odom) has returned to the family cabin in Cotchipee County, Georgia, having 20 years earlier fled from the plantation owner’s vicious bull-whip. Ol’ Cap’n Stonewall Jackson Cotchipee (Jay O. Sanders) is not actually a plantation owner surrounded by faithful retainers (that is, slaves); he just thinks he is. Purlie’s subservient brother Gitlow (Billy Eugene Jones) supports the notion, eagerly picking bales of cotton and soothing Ol’ Cap’n with antebellum spirituals.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
The prodigal Purlie returns bringing along Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins (Kara Young), a backcountry kitchen girl from Dothan, Alabama. The plan: to trick Ol’ Cap’n into returning a misappropriated $500 to enable Purlie to buy back Big Bethel, the local church, and once and forever toll the bell of liberty. Purlie is ably supported in the battle by Aunt Missy (Heather Alicia Simms), Gitlow’s long-suffering but all-knowing wife; and young Charlie Cotchipee (Noah Robbins), a stringbean of a lad who—to the disgust of Ol’ Cap’n—has a head filled with “integrationary ideas.” (This relatively minor role, back in 1961, launched the career of Alan Alda. Alda’s name is on this production’s Playbill title page as one of the play’s numerous producers, a designation shared with LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Samuel L. Jackson, and Phylicia Rashad, as well as Odom and Leon.)
In the end, the day of deliverance is at hand with Ol’ Cap’n safely and most definitely dead. “Let there be no merriment in these buryments,” preaches Purlie. But there is merriment aplenty.
The production is all that Davis, who died in 2005 at the age of 87, might have desired. Performed on an ingeniously functional set by Derek McLane, the original three acts have been distilled into one, performed in a breezy hundred minutes with nothing lost; the results play better without the need for all those old-fashioned non-automated scene changes. Emilio Sosa brings just the right touch to the costumes, as usual; note how Purlie’s best (and only) suit appears to be new but frayed along the backside. Lighting designer Adam Honoré makes the scene transitions memorable, while atmospheric musical accompaniment comes from composer Guy Davis, whose work honors his mother and father.
As playgoers might expect, Odom has all that silver-tongued preaching down cold. One of the chief delights of the production comes from the performance of Young as Lutiebelle. Those who saw her in Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s likely realized that she is a star to be, while Martyna Majok’s Cost of Living demonstrated that she’s a fine and intelligent actor as well. Here, she weaves a thorough spell, eyes wide in wonderment at the new world outside “Miss Emmylou’s kitchen” while succumbing to waves of weak-kneed infatuation toward her savior, “Reb’n Purlie.” She has over two seasons given three distinctive performances, each of them excellent, in three very different plays in very different styles. Kara Young, remember that name.
Sanders, who has spent so much time sitting around the kitchen table as the hapless husband/brother/father in Richard Nelson’s various Apple Family and Rhinebeck Panoroma plays, gets a chance to play overbroad comedy as the bigoted and lustful Ol’ Cap’n. He bites into the role, and practically into the other actors, with villainous joy. Simms as Missy, Vanessa Bell Calloway as Ol’ Cap’n’s housekeeper and cook Idella, and the rest are all up to their deliciously wry chores.
Most critical to the success of the evening, perhaps, is the work of director Leon. He honors Davis’s every intention, both written and unwritten in the script. And, more than that, he appears to be channeling what the author would want the play to stand for after the intervening 60-odd years, and how the wise activist Davis would address what is happening in the country right now. “Something is rotten in the cotton,” indeed.
Historical note: the late Broadway stage manager Charlie Blackwell told me that Davis started writing Purlie Victorious in his upstairs dressing room at the Imperial Theatre in 1958, when they were doing the long-running Lena Horne-Harold Arlen musical, Jamaica. In 1959, Ruby Dee created the role of Ruth Younger—opposite Sidney Poitier and Claudia McNeil—in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, the first Broadway play written by a black woman; the fifth, by my count, written by a black playwright; and the first to achieve commercial success.
When Poitier left the Raisin cast to resume his active motion picture career, Davis took over the role. The play was coproduced by Philip Rose, a first-time producer who quickly agreed to produce Purlie Victorious, which was just as unlikely a prospect for success. (Unlike the present revival, the 1961 production was produced, backed, and directed by liberal-to-leftist white men.) The play struggled to find an audience from the start; Rose, believing that the play must be seen, kept it running at a loss for more than seven months and closing with a significant deficit. Even this did not defeat him; in 1970, he produced a musical version, Purlie, co-authored by Davis. Featuring dynamic, Tony-winning performances by both Cleavon Little and Melba Moore, this achieved a wider popularity, though without achieving commercial success.
The original production of Purlie Victorious (with Davis, Dee, Alda, and other original cast members) was preserved in an obscure 1963 motion picture version, originally released under the title Gone Are the Days! This exists on video and can presumably be located; that said, the current performances of Odom and Young, along with the enlightening work of Leon, make this production at the Music Box well worth a visit.
All of which takes us back to Purlie’s, and Ossie’s, final words:
May the Constitution of the United States go with you; the Declaration of Independence stand by you; the Bill of Rights protect you; and the State Commission Against Discrimination keep the eyes of the law upon you, henceforth, now and forever. Amen.
Amen is right.
Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch opened September 27, 2023, at the Music Box Theatre and runs through February 4, 2024. Tickets and information: purlievictorious.com
