Laurence Fishburne owes it all to his mother Hattie, as he steadfastly reports in his stunning — in several senses — autobiographical Like They Do in the Movies. It was Hattie who decided on skimpy evidence that eight-year-old Laurence had the wherewithal to act and therefore must be enrolled in a school for talented youngsters.
Hattie was evidently right. The endlessly engaging Fishburne’s movie credits are at least one arm-length long. He also happily admits he loves performing on stage. Maybe prefers it? (He was last seen in the 2022 American Buffalo Broadway revival. In 1992 he snagged a Tony for his work in August Wilson’s Two Trains Running.)
Currently, he’s chosen a return to the theater where he wants to — is driven to? — tell his life story. Among other entertainment impulses. But more of that later, a phrase he frequently utters as he gads about Neal Patel’s elegantly simple set with large rectangular screen for Elaine J. McCarthy’s projections and only a table and a couple of chairs on hand. Yes, they’re present, although Fishburne sometimes merely sits cross-legged at the stage edge.
Entering to sinuous music that sound designer Justin Ellington provides, Fishburne wears a shimmeringly hooded garment of the sort fans might not expect him to choose. Immediately, he launches into loving and sometimes not so loving memories of Hattie and her equally demanding mother. He describes daily life in the Bronx after moving north from Alabama. As Laurence John Fishburne III, he talks about the Laurence Fishburne he believes to be his biological father and eventually goes on about at least one other man, Philadelphia’s Curtis Livingston, who might have served in that capacity. He’s already announced that the still living Hattie was a fervent romancer in her salad days.
Thanking in the program friends and associates August Wilson, Mike Nichols, Roscoe Lee Brown, Whoopi Goldberg, John Leguizamo, Anna Deavere Smith and others for encouraging him to pursue this outpouring, he devotes two-thirds of his two-act piece to explaining who he is in the three dimensions apart from his often-two-dimensional professional visibility.
Hattie is his primary focus, perhaps establishing her as one of the great stage mothers of all times. Indeed, he finishes his detailed backward glance with a portrait of Hattie’s most recent days that only stone-hearted attendees won’t find deeply moving. He clearly does.
Though Fishburne has done a solo show previously — the 2008 Thurgood as Justice Thurgood Marshall, on stage and for HBO — this one couldn’t be more of a contrast. By the time he’s finished his highly personal tale, it’s as if he’s revealing his past, his upbringing, his complete background (as much as he knows of it) from a profound impulse. It’s as if he can only satisfy and accept himself if he compulsively unburdens himself to a public that may have come to misleading conclusions drawn from his career. It’s as if he’s introducing himself this fully in order to become whole, to stand before the world as he truly is, to expose the good as well as the compromising elements. In other words, though there are, as mentioned, two chairs and a table available to him, there is no analyst’s couch. There might as well be.
Though the tall, handsome, sleekly versatile Fishburne focuses on himself, he does interrupt the impulsive private account — he’s written the entire enterprise, Leonard Foglia directs seamlessly — for sequences in which he impersonates characters he’s encountered along his map-skipping way. In one he impersonates a self-sufficient Black man who lives with, or at least spends much time with, white women Rosa and Bernice, both of whom freely accept the menage-a-trois situation. In another he’s a fellow dramatically recounting New Orleans during Katrina. He’s an Australian guy who’s founded a business called Playhouse69, which he insists is not a brothel and furthermore that he’s no way a pimp. Once, Fishburne’s discovered wearing a turtle-neck sweater he himself has knitted, wielding knitting needles as evidence. (Mariana Valencia is the knitting consultant.)
The sketches are good, clean — uh, mostly clean — fun, but it’s likely that audience members on exiting (a large percentage are fans, it’s to be presumed) will remember having spent the past hours with a man whose honesty about his achievements and shortcomings won’t soon be dismissed and may even serve as a model for living a life free of secrets and lies. Nice work if you can get it, and you can get it here.
Like They Do in the Movies opened March 21, 2024, at PAC NYC and runs through March 31. Tickets and information: pacny.org
