New York stage looks at class divisions, past and present
How the wealth-status-power divide affects lives
By Lucy Komisar
The United States is famous as a country that denies the
validity of class. You’d get a different idea seeing theatre in New York. Here,
there are new plays and revivals, American plays and imports, that deal with the
way class – defined through wealth, status and power – affects people's lives.
The new plays are "Radio Golf" and "In The Heights." The
revivals are "A Moon for the Misbegotten" and "Les Miserables," and the import,
from London, is "Coram Boy." They're all current, recent or about to be on
Broadway.
 The first two look at class through the prism race or
ethnicity. "Radio Golf" is the last of the late August Wilson's plays about a
black neighborhood in Pittsburgh in each decade of the 20th century. Here class
doesn't just separate blacks and whites, it divides blacks. It’s 1997, and
Harmond Wilks (Harry Lennix), a young up-and-coming black man, the son of a
wealthy realtor, is making a run for mayor.
He and his friends are part of the new black middle class.
His wife Mame (Tonya Pinkins) is about to get a job as press secretary to the
governor. His friend Roosevelt Hicks (James A. Williams) works at a bank but
sees his future in bigger things. Hicks cultivates powerful whites. Golf, a game
of the rich and upper middle class, becomes a symbol of where Roosevelt wants to
be.
In a broken down black neighborhood, next to a storefront
Harmond is using for his campaign, you see abandoned shops full of debris,
symbols of a community destroyed. Roosevelt tacks a poster of millionaire golf
champion Tiger Woods on the storefront wall. Harmond puts up one of Martin
Luther King Jr. The two men’s heroes are different.
 On the other side of the class divide are Sterling Johnson
(John Earl Jelks), who has spent time in jail for bank robbery and ekes out a
living doing small painting and construction jobs. He says he is looking for
Christians, ie. people with charity in their souls. Elder Joseph Barlow (Anthony
Chisholm), cynical, outspoken, his face in a permanent scowl, has a claim on the
house that the Wilks-Hicks project would destroy. Barlow is the real hero of the
play, the underclass guardian of family and community.
This is about the strivers who would get out of the ghetto,
move up, and sometimes turn their backs on moral obligations to those left
behind. The moral dilemma is: will Harmond press ahead with a project to build a
ten-story apartment high-rise for the middle class even if it wipes out homes
where poor blacks have lived for generations?
Harmond moves between both sides. He wants to be mayor, and
he wants to build the high-rise. But he annoys Mame by refusing to forget about
a policeman who killed a black man. Will Harmond forget and betray the
underclass of his community? It’s the question that Wilson, who died in 2005,
leaves for middle and upper class blacks to ponder about themselves.
"In The Heights" takes the same conflict of "making it" vs.
commitment to community to Latinos in America. How do those who move up into the
middle class relate to those left behind? The story was developed by Lin-Manuel
Miranda, who wrote the music and lyrics to a script by Quiara Alegria Hudes.
They portray a different dynamic than Wilson did. Here, everyone is a striver.
 Washington Heights is a neighborhood in upper Manhattan
that immigrants from Puerto Rican, Cuba and the Dominican Republic have
transformed into a Latino barrio. The play’s setting is a line of tenements and
shops – a bodega (Hispanic food shop) and a hair salon and, then, links to the
rest of the city and the country -- a car service, an entrance to the subway
(the metro), and the lights blinking on a tower of the George Washington Bridge
that takes drivers over the Hudson River to the West.
Nina (Mandy Gonzalez) has come back from her first year at
Stanford, an exclusive and expensive university in California. But she is
conflicted about being at school when it’s costing her parents so much, and she
misses the barrio. Unlike Mame and Roosevelt who want to leave "their people"
behind, she wants to stay connected. So, she drops a bombshell: she’s quit
Stanford. She’ll go to a local college. Nina’s dad, whose own father was a sugar
cane farmer in Cuba, is furious. He’s run a private taxi service since 1986, but
his storefront still bears a sign saying "O’Hanrahan’s," from the time when
Irish immigrants had it. When new Hispanic immigrants are rising from poverty to
the middle class, they are doing what other immigrants did before.
They won't all rise. The working class people in The
Heights feel stuck there. Representing them, Vanessa (Karen Olivo), who works in
the hair salon, aches to get out. Or they dream about striking it rich in the
lottery. Fortunate Nina has a way out. That is emphasized when we see her
moment-in-time relationship with Benny (Christopher Jackson), the charming
working-class boyfriend who she will leave behind in the sweepstakes for
success. Nina's connection to her community doesn’t stop her from finally
returning to Stanford. But it’s also clear she’ll keep her connections.
 Those two plays are about the present. There was a lot less
mobility, little question of "moving up," near the beginning of the last
century, especially for women. "A Moon for the Misbegotten," written by American
master Eugene O'Neill in 1943, is a sharp political commentary about class,
money and gender. It depicts a smart woman trapped in a poverty that offers no
escape. It is 1923. The 30-ish Josie Hogan (Eve Best) is helping her
self-involved father Paul (Colm Meaney) scrape survival out of a hard scrabble
Connecticut farm. Her brother has just taken off for better parts. As a woman,
she can't so easily escape.
Josie and Paul see their "way out" as Jim Tyrone (Kevin
Spacey), a rich, alcoholic, third-rate actor whose inheritance makes him the
Hogans’ landlord. They are all of Irish extraction, but the Hogans’ Irish
accents -- as opposed to Tyrone’s good English -- set them a class apart. Jim
Tyrone perhaps for want of something better to do visits Josie. Can she catch
him? According to her father’s plan to get the farm? For herself to get a
husband? Josie is trapped between two largely useless men.
The cards are really held by T. Stedman Harder (Billy
Carter), the owner of a neighboring estate, who is defined by his pretentious
first initial and his position as an executive with Standard Oil. Paul carries
out class conflict by letting his pigs into Harder's ice pond, which infuriates
the oil man. It's a pyrrhic victory. Harder has the money to buy their place
from Tyrone and evict them into the underclass, to a situation that O’Neill
leaves to our imagination.
The other revival is the world-wide phenomenon, "Les
Miserables." Based on the 1862 novel by Victor Hugo, translated into English as
"The Wretched," the play is about the suffering of the underclass at the hands
of the privileged in France in the early 1800s, a reason for the revolution that
overthrew Louis XVI and his aristocracy.
This musical play is the third longest running show on
Broadway and has been produced in 21 languages in 38 countries. Its
extraordinary success of makes one wonder at the impact it's had on the 54
million people who have seen it.
 The hero, Jean Valjean (Alexander Gemignani), has been
jailed for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread with which to feed his sister’s
child. The production washes the poor in brown light; there is no color to them
or their clothes.
Fantine (Lea Salonga), deserted by her husband and working
at a factory to support her young child, is fired because she won't sleep with
the foreman. She finds no solidarity among the workers and is forced into
prostitution. The "Lovely Ladies" song in the bordello, with words like "will
the bleeding ever stop?" does not romanticize the desperate sale of flesh for
food.
 Here there are class cross-overs on both sides. The
Thénadiers, evil-comic inn keepers who are paid to take care of Fantine's
daughter, Cosette (Kaylie Rubinaccio), are working class turncoats who prey on
their own. The challenge to oppression comes from students who unite with the
underclass. "How long before the barricades arise?" they demand.
Now there is color: red! "Red for the blood of angry men.
Black for the dark of ages past, the night that ends at last." The students
sing "the music of the people who will not be slaves again." This is arguably
the most radical class play that Broadway and the rest of the world has seen in
years.
Looking at class divisions in England in the mid 1700s,
half a century earlier than "Les Miz," an import from The National Theatre of
Great Britain is the new play, "Coram Boy." Based on a novel published in 2000
by Jamila Gavin, adapted by Helen Edmundson, it tells the story of Young Alex (Xanthe
Elbrick) heir to a country estate, who has become a friend of Thomas (Charlotte
Parry), a working-class boy whose musical talent has gotten him a place in the
cathedral choir. (The young boys are played by women.) Thomas's talent trumps
class, to an extent. Another resident of the orphanage where Thomas lived is
Toby, who has been saved from an African slave ship.
 Less lucky is an underclass of children condemned to the
workhouse by their parents’ poverty or abandoned by women made pregnant by
employers or other dominating abusive men.
Highlighting the hypocrisy of the time, one of the evil men
who gets his charge pregnant is the magistrate Claymore (Tom RHS Farrell), who
rails against "the lower orders" and anything that "encourages wanton
procreation, illegitimate children."
Meshak Gardiner (Brad Fleischer), a Dickensian villain,
takes payments from mothers promising to take their babies to the Coram Hospital
for orphans. But he murders them. Later, he insinuates himself into the hospital
and pretends to find homes for young children while really selling them into
slavery in Arabia.
One character says, "All wealth is built on the suffering
of others."
Is it surprising to find plays with such messages on
Broadway, in the belly of the capitalist beast? These five productions about the
class divisions of race, ethnicity and wealth – produced on New York main
stages, not in fringe theatres -- show that American playwrights or directors
and audiences find those themes important. And that the immorality of class
power is something they care about.
"Radio Golf," Written by August Wilson, Directed by Kenny
Leon, Starring Harry Lennix, Tonya Pinkins, Anthony Chisholm, John Earl Jelks,
James A. Williams. Photos Carol Rosegg. Cort Theatre, 138 W. 48th St. Tue - Sat
8pm; Wed & Sat 2pm; Sun 3pm, Running time 2:35, $31.25 - $96.25. 212-239-6200.
"In The Heights." Music & lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Book by Quiara Alegria Hudes. Directed by Thomas Kail. Starring Andrea Burns,
Janet Dacal, Robin de Jesus, Mandy Gonzalez, John Herrera, Christopher Jackson,
Priscilla Lopez, Olga Merediz, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Karen Olivo, Rosie Fiedelman,
Asmeret Ghebremichael, Joshua Henry, Nina Lafarga, Doreen Montalvo, Javier
Munoz, Eliseo Roman, Luis Salgado, Seth Stewart, Rickey Tripp, Michael
Balderrama, Stephanie Klemons. Photos Joan Marcus. 37 Arts, 450 W. 37th St.
Through July 15, 2007. Reopens on Broadway in the fall. Tue - Sat 8pm; Sat & Sun
2pm; Sun 7pm. $36.25 - $76.25. 212-307-4100.
"A Moon for the Misbegotten." Written by Eugene O’Neill.
Directed by Howard Davies. Starring Eve Best, Kevin Spacey, Colm Meaney, Billy
Carter, Eugene O’Hare. Photos Simon Annand. Old Vic Theatre Company at Brooks
Atkinson Theatre, 256 W. 47th St. Tue - Sat 7pm; Wed & Sat 2pm; Sun 3pm. Through
June 10, 2007. Running time: 3 hrs. $82.50 - $102.50; Students: $26.50.
212-307-4100.
"Les Miserables," Music by Claude-Michel Schoenberg. Book &
lyrics by Alain Boublil. English lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer. Directed by Trevor
Nunn & John Caird. Starring Alexander Gemignani, Ben Davis, Gary Beach, Ann
Harada, Mandy Bruno, Lea Salonga, Max von Essen, Adam Jacobs, Ali Ewoldt, Daniel
Bogart, Justin Bohon, Brian D'Addario, Blake Ginther, JD Goldblatt, Victor
Hawks, Robert Hunt, Nehal Joshi, Jeff Kready, Doug Kreeger, James Chip Leonard,
Jacob Levine, Austyn Myers, Drew Sarich, Becca Ayers, Kate Chapman, Nikki Renee
Daniels, Karen Elliott, Marya Grandy, Megan McGinnis, Haviland Stillwell, Idara
Victor. Photos Joan Marcus. Broadhurst Theatre, 235 W. 44th St. Tue 7pm; Wed -
Sat 8pm; Wed & Sat 2pm; Sun 3pm. Running time 2:45. $36.25 - $111.25.
212-239-6200.
http://www.lesmis.com.
"Coram Boy. Adapted by Helen Edmundson from Jamila Gavin's
novel. Directed by Melly Still. Starring Jolly Abraham, Uzo Aduba, Jacqueline
Antaramian, Bill Camp, Dashiell Eaves, Xanthe Elbrick, Tom Riis Farrell, Brad
Fleischer, Karron Graves, Laura Heisler, Angela Lin, David Macdonald, Quentin
Maré, Jan Maxwell, Kathleen McNenny, Cristin Milioti, Charlotte Parry, Christina
Rouner, Ivy Vahanian, Wayne Wilcox. Photos Joan Marcus. The National Theatre of
Great Britain at Imperial Theatre, 249 W. 45th Street. Closed May 27, 2007.
http://www.coramboyonbroadway.com.
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