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THE PLAY'S OF MAX SPARBER: MINSTREL SHOW REVIEWED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES
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Naomi Siegel of The New York Times reviewed Minstrel Show on 10.14.07:
The image is seared in the memory: A man hangs from a tree, a noose around his neck, his body mutilated. In the foreground, onlookers, some with children in tow, mill around in grim satisfaction.
Audiences at “Minstrel Show, or the Lynching of William Brown,” Max Sparber’s disturbing 1998 theater piece now on stage at the New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch, do not actually see this scene. They are forced to conjure it while hearing the shockingly graphic reminiscences of a black minstrel performer who watched it happen in 1919. He and his vaudeville partner were prisoners in the Douglas County Courthouse in Omaha as William Brown was dragged out of the burning building to his death.
Mr. Sparber has taken a shameful, little-noted event in American history and fashioned a raw, gripping work. He has woven two strands of storytelling artfully and seamlessly into a striking tapestry. The first is that of the minstrels, fictional characters struggling to find a niche as performers in a world defined by racism. Performing “Tableaux of Negro Life” in blackface before a black audience, they shuffle and shimmy through their version of the “yahoo song,” learned while both men were imprisoned at the Parchman Farm penitentiary simply for being black. The ditty secretly disparages white folks.
The second strand in the drama is taken from an actual event: the killing of William Brown, an innocent man accused of raping a 19-year-old white woman named Agnes Loebeck. In a savage riot, a mob of as many as 5,000 grabbed the terrified prisoner from the courthouse and then shot, castrated, lynched and burned him before dragging his body through the streets. One rioter and a bystander, both white, were also killed, and the mayor of Omaha was strung up and nearly murdered after he attempted to maintain law and order.
Spencer Scott Barros and Kelcey Watson offer wrenching portraits as the performers, who describe themselves as “witnesses to history,” their mission “to tell it, to teach it.” Comrades in high jinks as well as misery, they play off each other’s characters with near-perfect teamwork. The final scene, directed with no holds barred by Rob Urbinati, is almost unbearable to watch in its explicit description of the horror.
Quinn K. Stone, the set designer, has effectively replicated the burned-out room in the courthouse where the men viewed the lynching. Jill Nagle’s lighting, suggesting the rising flames of the fire, turns up the heat when needed.
“Minstrel Show” is not, to be sure, a comfortable evening’s entertainment. Recent protests about the theater’s use of blackface images in its advertising attest to the work’s power to provoke controversy. But it is a play that bears unrelenting witness, a crucial part of the search for truth.
The image is seared in the memory: A man hangs from a tree, a noose around his neck, his body mutilated. In the foreground, onlookers, some with children in tow, mill around in grim satisfaction.
Audiences at “Minstrel Show, or the Lynching of William Brown,” Max Sparber’s disturbing 1998 theater piece now on stage at the New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch, do not actually see this scene. They are forced to conjure it while hearing the shockingly graphic reminiscences of a black minstrel performer who watched it happen in 1919. He and his vaudeville partner were prisoners in the Douglas County Courthouse in Omaha as William Brown was dragged out of the burning building to his death.
Mr. Sparber has taken a shameful, little-noted event in American history and fashioned a raw, gripping work. He has woven two strands of storytelling artfully and seamlessly into a striking tapestry. The first is that of the minstrels, fictional characters struggling to find a niche as performers in a world defined by racism. Performing “Tableaux of Negro Life” in blackface before a black audience, they shuffle and shimmy through their version of the “yahoo song,” learned while both men were imprisoned at the Parchman Farm penitentiary simply for being black. The ditty secretly disparages white folks.
The second strand in the drama is taken from an actual event: the killing of William Brown, an innocent man accused of raping a 19-year-old white woman named Agnes Loebeck. In a savage riot, a mob of as many as 5,000 grabbed the terrified prisoner from the courthouse and then shot, castrated, lynched and burned him before dragging his body through the streets. One rioter and a bystander, both white, were also killed, and the mayor of Omaha was strung up and nearly murdered after he attempted to maintain law and order.
Spencer Scott Barros and Kelcey Watson offer wrenching portraits as the performers, who describe themselves as “witnesses to history,” their mission “to tell it, to teach it.” Comrades in high jinks as well as misery, they play off each other’s characters with near-perfect teamwork. The final scene, directed with no holds barred by Rob Urbinati, is almost unbearable to watch in its explicit description of the horror.
Quinn K. Stone, the set designer, has effectively replicated the burned-out room in the courthouse where the men viewed the lynching. Jill Nagle’s lighting, suggesting the rising flames of the fire, turns up the heat when needed.
“Minstrel Show” is not, to be sure, a comfortable evening’s entertainment. Recent protests about the theater’s use of blackface images in its advertising attest to the work’s power to provoke controversy. But it is a play that bears unrelenting witness, a crucial part of the search for truth.
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