Theater Online - New York Theater Reviews

Black actors in the Hollywood of the 1930's were effectively straight-jacketed into stereotyped roles, if they were shown at all. Some performers, like Stepin Fetchit, disgraced their race with a nearly sub-human, caricatured style. Others, like Louise Beavers and Butterfly McQueen, were made to play dumb (though Beavers had her moments of irritation on screen, and one great performance in John Stahl's 1934 version of "Imitation of Life.") In this time period, Paul Robeson and Hattie McDaniel were the only black performers on the American screen who managed to intermittently escape their scripts and put honest, interesting behavior into their films. McDaniel often played maids, and famously said she's rather play a maid in a movie than be one in real life. She started off in vaudeville, did menial work when times were tough, and moved to Hollywood in the early thirties. When McDaniel had a chance to hold the screen, she was riveting: witness her angry, half-crazed protector of Marlene Dietrich in "Blonde Venus" (1932). Or her hilariously "I don't give a shit" maid to Katharine Hepburn in "Alice Adams" (1935). She fully deserved her Oscar for Mammy in "Gone with the Wind" (1939) especially for her impassioned, sorrowful monologue of loss on a staircase towards the end: in another actresses' hands, it might have just been plot exposition. McDaniel takes it and makes it a steady, building lament for the unfairness of life.

McDaniel was vilified by the NAACP in the 1940's, and up to her death in the early fifties, and this quite unfair personal assault is the chief subject of "(mis)Understanding Mammy." The star of this one-woman show is Capathia Jenkins, who scored a big hit in Martin Short's solo Broadway show. It's understandable that she'd want to play this pioneer, and she tries mightily to bring Hattie back to life, but there are almost as many obstacles in her way as there were for McDaniel herself. The script, by Joan Ross Sorkin, is a bald-faced "first I did this, and then I did that" biographical treatment, and the lines she's given her Hattie are trite and unbelievable. More importantly, Jenkins, for all her talent and charisma, is miscast in the role. She's much too young to be playing a dying woman, and when she moves on stage, she has a sashaying fluidity that never suggests McDaniel's solid, almost immovable presence. When she sings several songs, it seems to be merely to show off her voice, which has none of McDaniel's Bessie Smith-like gruffness. The play manages to be a sustained attack against Walter White, the head of the NAACP, but there are no layers here, nothing to suggest what must have been all the many mixed emotions in McDaniels' messy, unresolved life. Jenkins strains to defend this embattled woman, and her empathy is touching, especially when she portrays McDaniel's agony after a false pregnancy. But a real connection to the subject is missing, which is the fault of the playwright. Jenkins gives it her all, just as McDaniel did, but she deserves a more nuanced text to work with.