A fascinating curio, at the Metropolitan
Playhouse (occupying an approximately
60-seat space above the Connelly Theatre on East 4th Street) is the first NYC
revival of Walk Hard, a
1946 play that ran only a week on Broadway (as a production of the American
Negro Theatre), based on a novel, Walk Hard, Talk Loud, published in 1940.
I’m
not sure why it should be, but neither this revival nor one in London 11 years
ago, acknowledges the novel in its credits, yet the novel is cited on IBDB, and
the London production even used the fuller title. Which is too bad, because
it’s not merely that Abram Hill is
among the first significant African American dramatists of the 20th Century;
but that his play adapts a first novel by Len Zinberg (better known to aficionados of classic pulp fiction
by his much-more-often-used, pseudonymous byline, Ed Lacy), a white writer, who was an activist
and very concerned with correcting injustices to the African American
experience in America, and whose work was hailed by African American notables
as unusually insightful, though penned by “an outsider.”
The
alchemical fusion of Zinberg/Lacy and Hill produced a play of the kind of
socially aware verve that wears its heart on its sleeve, and seeks not only to
engage via narration, but to rouse awareness. It’s about a young black man,
spotted by a manager, defending himself with deft fisticuffs on the street,
recruited into the fight game, there to encounter the inequities of white/black
treatment in a proportion previously unknown even to him; and as a prideful
fellow unwilling to stand down, he crosses paths with some powerful people who
don’t mind enforcing their convictions in a less than law-abiding manner.
The
dialogue is pregnant with old-style Noo Yawkese in its patois and rhythms, and
the dramatic trajectory is uncluttered and unflaggingly paced. It plays a
little bit like a direct antecedent of Rod Serling’s Requiem for a
Heavyweight, but in a somewhat less gritty
manner, its universe not quite so bereft of joy. It jumps the rails pretty
spectacularly in its portrayal of the hero’s young girl friend, by making her
so conspicuously the moral mouthpiece that she might as well be costumed in a
messenger’s uniform…but you never watch anything like this without a certain
forbearance for the time in which it emerged.
A
generally excellent cast, featuring raw newbies and seasoned veterans (with a
bit of bold, cross-racial casting in supporting parts) does quite well in the
limited space under the direction of Imani.
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