At the Act One climax of Finian’s Rainbow, which premiered 75 years ago, Billboard Rawkins, a bigoted white Southern senator, turns into a black man by the power of a wish. There’s a blackout, and the actor playing Rawkins hurriedly smears blackface on. Obviously you can’t get away with that anymore, and these days, if anyone dares to do Finian’s (they should), there’s a blackout, and a black Rawkins rushes on to replace the white one. However, in the Act One climax of Black No More, a new musical adapted from George S. Schuyler’s 1931 satirical novel, an opposite racial transition happens.
Fucking A
Suzan-Lori Parks’s plays always speak their own language, but in 2000’s Fucking A the playwright one-upped herself. The women of the play have developed their own semi-secret language called TALK that allows them to hide in plain sight among callous men. It’s as beautiful and elegant an illustration of female solidarity as any in Parks’s work, and indicative of her gift for fashioning skewed worlds that make us see our own world anew. She doesn’t so much pull back the curtain as shoot it through the back wall.