[Sophisticated comedic turns from Leslie Odom, Jr., and Kara Young
guide Kenny Leon’s Broadway revival of Ossie Davis’s 1961 play.]
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“PURLIE VICTORIOUS” HUSTLES FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE  
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Vinson Cunningham
September 30, 2023
The New Yorker
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_ Sophisticated comedic turns from Leslie Odom, Jr., and Kara Young
guide Kenny Leon’s Broadway revival of Ossie Davis’s 1961 play. _

Odom plays each of Purlie’s notes with a musician’s tonal
perfection., Illustration by Amrita Marino

 

The Reverend Purlie Victorious Judson (Leslie Odom, Jr.), the hero of
Ossie Davis’s 1961 comedy, “Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate
Romp Through the Cotton Patch”—revived on Broadway at the Music
Box Theatre, directed by Kenny Leon—is, above all else, a hustler.
You might know somebody like this: He blusters onto the stage of your
life, pouring out plans before he’s properly introduced himself,
energized toward some vista that only he can see. He puts an arm over
your shoulder and tries to convince you that you’re on your way
there together, as partners, but in his mind’s eye, you can tell,
he’s up in the pulpit and you’re down in the seats. Half of what
he says sounds cockamamie, but something about him—his personal
history, perhaps, or a kind of animal endurance in his
bearing—persuades you that, somehow, he’ll get what he wants.

In the case of this show, most of what Purlie wants is a fair shake
for Black people. He’s an itinerant minister who has come back to
the postbellum Georgia plantation where he grew up. He wants to rally
the people there—who now work as sharecroppers for Ol’ Cap’n
Cotchipee (the intensely funny Jay O. Sanders)—to take back their
local church, Big Bethel. He cooks up a scheme that will, with one
stroke, get them the deed to the church and free his family from their
impossible debts to Ol’ Cap’n.

Purlie’s a benign enough con man whose con is social justice. He
talks sonorously, in a nearly constant preacher’s cadence; he always
seems to be skiing downhill, with great skill and heedless abandon,
toward some grand, irrefutable point. When he gets really wound up, he
adopts a half-sung, high-flown, heavily syncopated tone whose aim is
less to emphasize an argument than to stoke a frenzy in a row of
invisible congregants. At a peak moment, he rattles off this rhyming
confection: “Let us, therefore, stifle the rifle of conflict,
shatter the scatter of discord, smuggle the struggle, tickle the
pickle, and grapple the apple of peace!”

It’s clear that the clergy isn’t his first racket, and it might
not be his last. “Last time you was a professor of Negro
philosophy,” his sister-in-law, Missy (Heather Alicia Simms), says,
with a hint of acid in her voice. “You got yourself a license?” As
the play unfolds, we watch Purlie oscillate between courage and
cowardice, brilliance and haplessness, forthrightness and a penchant
for telling tall tales. His plan is to pass off a girl whom he
captivated via one of his sermons, Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins (Kara
Young), as his long-lost cousin, Bee, and trick Ol’ Cap’n into
handing over a five-hundred-dollar inheritance that he owes the
family.

Purlie’s brother, Gitlow (the always impressive Billy Eugene Jones),
works for Ol’ Cap’n and plays his role as the Good Negro, singing
and shuffling, to a T. He’s been given the farcical title
Deputy-for-the-Colored. Another Black member of Ol’ Cap’n’s
household is Idella (Vanessa Bell Calloway), who has raised Ol’
Cap’n’s son, Charlie (Noah Robbins), as if he were her own.
Purlie’s got to corral all these co-racialists—and their divergent
loyalties—and lead them all toward reclaiming Big Bethel.

In creating Purlie, Davis took two long-lasting tropes of communal
Black life and twinned them in a single body. On the one hand, Purlie
is reminiscent of Father Divine, or, later, the Reverend Ike—a
flashy, overconfident preacher who makes lofty promises of prosperity
and wins wild, irrational allegiance from Black masses grown tired of
living like the lowly Jesus. On the other hand, he’s decided on a
career as a self-appointed, semi-professional spokesman for the race.
He’s T. D. Jakes and Al Sharpton all at once, a study in the uses
and abuses of oratory in Black life.

A creature like Purlie, made up of cultural memory and social satire,
is often hard to play. Cliché and niche obscurity, the Scylla and
Charybdis of in-group commentary, lie to either side of the role. But
Odom guides his performance cannily, playing each of Purlie’s notes
with a musician’s tonal perfection. Sometimes he’s an overbearing
tuba, sometimes he’s an earnest flute. Odom makes plain at every
impasse that, sure, Purlie cares about his image, about collecting
disciples—but that he also wakes up each morning with his mind on
real freedom for his people.

“Purlie Victorious” is also an investigation of the allure of text
in American life. There’s lots of to-do about documents. Purlie’s
preaching draws richly from the American past instead of from the
Bible. “I preached the New Baptism of Freedom for all mankind,
according to the Declaration,” he tells Missy, describing the sermon
that drew Lutiebelle to his flock, “taking as my text the
Constitution of the United States of America, Amendments First through
Fifteenth, which readeth as follows: ‘Congress shall make no
law—’ ”

Charlie, Ol’ Cap’n Cotchipee’s egalitarian, integrationist son,
constantly refers to statutes. Integration is “the law of the
land,” he says to his father, “and I intend to obey it!” The
rightful inheritance that Purlie means to purloin by madcap deception
is another promissory note whose power drives the action of the play.
This obsession with text alienates Purlie and Charlie, and anybody
who’d follow them, from the more sensual, instinctual culture of the
formerly slaveholding South. Guys like Ol’ Cap’n Cotchipee and, in
a different way, Gitlow Judson can’t be bothered with the nuances of
the law or the declamations of the Declaration: their rules, long
held, are unwritten. You know where you fit in by following patterns
deeply rooted in the past. Between Blacks and whites there’s
something “no Supreme Court in the world can understand,” Ol’
Cap’n says.

It’s funny, then, that this production’s greatest asset, by far,
is its emphasis on physical comedy. Odom finds a lyricism in
Purlie’s body that’s not always evident in his rhetoric. Jones
pairs Gitlow’s nostalgic singing of Negro work songs with a
dancer’s precision, allowing his body to convey an ironic
subversion: even the most archetypal Uncle Tom might have wordless
designs on a brighter future. The whole company moves in choreographed
tandem—one bit, at a particularly melodramatic moment, has them
running up and downstage like relay racers, skidding with cartoonish
exaggeration.

Then there’s Kara Young, whose turn as Lutiebelle is a pinnacle of
her burgeoning career. Young’s performances in recent plays such as
C. A. Johnson’s “All the Natalie Portmans,” Lynn Nottage’s
“Clyde’s,” and last year’s revival of Martyna Majok’s
“Cost of Living” showed off her otherworldly comic chops, which
she grounds in what feels like a small, true place of personal pain.
Here, though, in Lutiebelle, Young has found a perfect vehicle to
transmit all the aspects of her talent.

Lutiebelle is a poor, sweet young woman who feels unequal to the task
of impersonating Purlie’s cousin Bee—Bee was a beautiful college
girl, and Lutiebelle doesn’t consider herself pretty, or smart—but
she’s been waiting for a long time, it seems, for a chance at
adventure. She was abandoned by her parents at an early age, and it
takes almost nothing for her to fall in love with Purlie and his talk.
She worries and pines and pouts and puts on airs and tries to
learn—in this way, she’s almost a metaphor for an entire race
trying to squirm itself, by hook or by crook, toward higher ground.

Young plays Lutiebelle with a physical and emotional energy
reminiscent of Lucille Ball’s or Carol Burnett’s. She acts big and
broad, then pulls the string of her imagination right back, showing
how small, everyday hurt, the kind we all carry around, can fuel a
great fire of productive delusion. Young’s approach to acting is
like the sophisticated engine of a sleek sports car—she floors the
pedal around perilous curves and somehow stops on a dime. There’s
nobody quite like her in the theatre, or anywhere else, these days.

Kenny Leon, with his flair for showmanship and sizzle, is the ideal
director to match Young’s indomitable energy. His frenetic pacing
and elaborate physical setups create a framework in which her
intricate riffs can add up to a meaning that stretches beyond the
text. Young’s hilarious, heartening Lutiebelle fulfills a hope
shared by lovers of performance and workers for social peace—that
freedom might be found not only on a page but written in a body, and
on the heart. ♦

_VINSON CUNNINGHAM joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2016.
Since 2019, he has served as a theatre critic for the magazine. In
2020, he was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for his Profile
of the comedian Tracy Morgan
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His writing on books, art, and culture has appeared in the Times
Magazine, the Times Book Review, Vulture, the Awl, The Fader,
and McSweeney’s, where he wrote a column called “Field Notes from
Gentrified Places.”_

_Cunningham previously served as a staff assistant at the Obama White
House._

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* Theater Review
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* Ossie Davis
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* social justice
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* Broadway
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* Leslie Odom Jr.
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* Kara Young
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* Kenny Leon
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