Reviewed by David Spencer
It's an interesting irony that when George Stevens wrote and directed the 3-hour
mini-series Separate But Equal, dramatizing the battle against legalized school
segregation, in which Brown vs. the Board of Education was argued in front of
the Supreme Court—a mini-series which featured no less than Sidney Poitier
playing NAACP jurist Thurgood Marshall, Burt Lancaster as his legal opponent John W.
Davis and Richard Kiley as Chief Justice Earl Warren—it emerged as a
well-meaning, academically respectable but surprisingly leaden docu-drama (or
anyway, that's how it struck me and the colleagues who eagerly gathered to
watch it on tape, just after it aired in 1991)...whereas with his one-actor
play, Thurgood, Stevens
manages to canvas the entirety of Marshall's legal career, with that case as
the centerpiece, in 90 highly entertaining and informative intermissionless
minutes.
That said, Thurgood is hardly the most exceptional
one-man bio-drama ever written; the script is conspicuously neat and orderly,
assiduously chronological, its paragraphs of language so well-formed that even
the most realistic actor will never quite make you lose sight of the fact that
he's memorized it (the ideal of course being the illusion that it's all being
improvised on the spot); but then, that's endemic to almost all such evenings,
with a mere handful of exceptions—and most of those anomalies (the two most
famous being of course Hal Holbrook's Mark Twain Tonight and Paul Shyre's Will Rogers'
USA, performed
by James Whitmore) are presented as if actual speaking concerts, the material
drawn from their writings.
Thurgood has no such presentational
conceit: the title figure enters and just starts addressing us, no context to
provide urgency or need; yet star Laurence Fishburne, manages to quickly deflect us
from wondering why Marshall stopped by the Booth Theatre to tell us all this stuff. Implicit in
his demeanor and in the history relates is the message that This is stuff
you ought to know, because it affects lives, and it's key to how people get on
in the world. There
seems a tacit assumption that we've gathered here because we're all good people
and true, in need of inspiration during troubled times. And to paraphrase a
hipster expression, it works well enough for jazz. Under Leonard Foglia's agreeably invisible direction
(with a one-actor show, that's a good thing), Fishburne has both the gravitas of a
historical heavyweight and the easy delivery of a born raconteur, and you're in
good hands while in his company. And a little sorry to see him go when he's
done.
Would that education might
always be so painless...