'The Scottsboro Boys' Actors Walk a Very Fine Line - NYTimes.com

Hard Steps to Walk a Fine Line in ‘Scottsboro’
By PATRICIA COHEN

In the new Broadway musical “The Scottsboro Boys,” a black actor plays the part of Samuel Leibowitz, a white Jewish lawyer from New York who defends nine African-American youths wrongly imprisoned for raping two white women in the Alabama town Scottsboro in 1931.

That would be tricky enough if the script played it straight. It doesn’t.

The actor, Forrest McClendon, is playing an actor playing the lawyer. Specifically, he portrays a comic fixture of old-time minstrel shows, here called Mister Tambo, who delivers lines and lyrics in a broadly caricatured style.

The idea is to use the minstrel-show tradition, so clearly offensive to modern sensibilities, to drive home the horror of one of American history’s most shameful episodes of racial injustice. And Mr. McClendon doesn’t mind saying this was one very fraught assignment.

“It was absolutely a very, very fine line to walk,” he explained, as he sat with some of his fellow cast members in the lower lobby of the Lyceum Theater before a recent performance.

The challenge was a result of a bold decision by the musical’s white creators, John Kander and Fred Ebb (who died in 2004) — the celebrated authors of “Cabaret” and “Chicago,” blockbuster hits also with a subversive strain — to use provocative, buffoonish and theatrically extreme language to dramatize a disturbing chapter in American history.

For the African-American actors, however, it means inhabiting roles that in their original incarnations — when minstrel shows constituted the most popular form of live entertainment in 19th-century America — were meant to debase blacks and sentimentalize slavery.

At the same time, the cast must bring the audience members along for the ride, making them comfortable enough to laugh at cartoonish portrayals of blustering white sheriffs, prancing Southern belles and shuffling former slaves while connecting to the anguish of lives ruined by bigotry.

Mr. McClendon said he started by treating Leibowitz as realistically as possible. “I literally prepared an astrological chart for him to really just do everything that I could to channel his real spirit,” he said with a laugh. Then, selecting details garnered from a filmed interview with Leibowitz’s son, Mr. McClendon took the character to a ridiculous extreme.

“His own son talked about how quick he was with a one-liner, how he had this baritone voice he would use to just chilling effect,” Mr. McClendon said. “I used certain aspects of his speaking voice with a little bit of Cagney and a little bit of Jolson.”

When trying out different characterizations, he said he was encouraged when Mr. Kander told him: “You cannot go too far. Just go. ”

Mr. McClendon, like J. C. Montgomery, his understudy, had played the minstrel before as part of different theatrical productions about the American songwriter Stephen Foster. Mr. McClendon also appeared in blackface as the master of ceremonies during a production of “The Threepenny Opera.” In his eyes a subversive thread ran through the minstrel tradition.

By contrast, Joshua Henry, who stars as one of the boys, Haywood Patterson, was initially shocked by it.

“Just hearing it was a minstrel show kind of repelled me immediately,” Mr. Henry said. After reading the script, however, he understood that the creative team, which included the Tony-winning director Susan Stroman and the librettist David Thompson, were using it to underscore the era’s racism: “The boys at the end take control of the story and the way that it’s told.”

Patterson is the moral center of the show, refusing to admit falsely to a crime even to obtain his freedom, and his part is the most naturalistic. There is one scene during the first of a series of trials, though, when Patterson adopts the shucking, submissive stance expected by the white judge and prosecutors in an attempt to persuade them that he is telling the truth.

“I hated it,” Mr. Henry said, recalling the early rehearsals. “It made my skin crawl.” But he found it true to the way Patterson described his own experiences in a 1950 book. “If he needed something, a roll of toilet paper, he would have to raise his voice up a little bit and say, ‘Yessir boss, yessir boss,’ and put on a big smile,” Mr. Henry said.

“That was a very foreign feeling to give over to 100 percent,” he added. “It is probably one of the hardest sections of the show, even now.”

The youngest cast member, Jeremy Gumbs, 12, was probably more puzzled than disturbed by the minstrel form. He admits that even after reading the script and score a couple of times, “I still didn’t understand it.” Now, he said, he sees it as a useful device for weaving horrifying historical details into the story line. His character, Eugene Williams, just shy of his 13th birthday when he was arrested, was forced to sleep near the electric chair. His nightmares are brought to life onstage in a tap-dance number titled “Electric Chair” that mixes the comic and the grotesque.

Colman Domingo, who plays Mr. Bones, the sheriff and an assortment of other roles, had no experience with minstrelsy, but said all he needed to hear was that Mr. Kander, Mr. Ebb and Ms. Stroman were involved. “I’m so drawn to unconventional and daring storytelling,” said Mr. Domingo, who has appeared in “Passing Strange,” “Chicago” and “Well” on Broadway.

Like the other cast members, Mr. Domingo did research and watched clips from minstrel shows, from which he occasionally borrowed.

Both the creators and actors worked hard at finding the right tone for each character. For the sadistic sheriff, he said, Ms. Stroman told him to experiment first with playing the character completely realistically (“that threw the show off balance”) to an over-the-top spoof (“that would have colored it too brightly”).

Later, Mr. Domingo, as the prosecuting lawyer, sings a song based on an actual statement made by the Attorney General to the jury: “Is justice in this case going to be bought and sold in Alabama with Jew money from New York?”

“The biggest question I had was how ‘Jew money’ would land in New York,” Mr. Domingo said.

He remembers that when the musical first ran Off Broadway at the Vineyard Theater, a woman booed him; there have been walkouts on Broadway since the show’s opening. Last week a writer in The Amsterdam News said she was “offended” and “unamused” by the show. “Off-color songs were being sung and offensive lines said as actors acted like buffoons,” she wrote. And this past Saturday a small group of protesters, most of whom had not seen the musical, picketed the Lyceum.

Theatergoers do receive an insert in their Playbills that recounts the history of the Scottsboro incident and describes the minstrel tradition. Still, Mr. Domingo said he understood how some people might initially be thrown off balance in the first minutes of the show. He remembers Mr. Kander telling him how his “Cabaret” team ended up cutting a derogatory reference to Jews in the song “If You Could See Her Through My Eyes” after out-of-town audiences reacted negatively in 1966. (The full lyrics were restored in the 1972 movie and subsequent revivals.)

Audience members at “The Scottsboro Boys” are sometimes unsure how to respond to the buffoonery, Mr. Domingo said. From his perch onstage, he said, the show goes over best when there is a more even mix of black and white audience members.

“It becomes easier,” he said, “for people to understand they can actually laugh.”

'The Scottsboro Boys' Actors Walk a Very Fine Line - NYTimes.com.