Purlie's Paltry Persuasion

IT'S A strange breed of show that provokes laughter, applause, foot-tapping and even a standing ovation and still, beyond a doubt, flops. Purlie, Leverett House and Black CAST's current offering, offers just such an enigma. This rambunctious musical comedy about race relations in the last-1950s South had a respectable Broadway run and has since bubbled cheerfully on numerous regional and school stages. Purlie's infectious and vigorous score, its complement of genuinely funny lines ("College ain't so much where you been as how you talk when you get back") and its unassailable but not over-bearing message of racial dignity and hope account for its remarkable drawing power.

It's hard to pin down exactly why the Leverett gang can't meet even these relatively simple challenges. The music alone hints at the exuberance that must permeate other productions. But disappointingly, dancers and actors prance through hackneyed plot twists with situation-comedy blocking, alternately mouthing highflown platitudes and one-liners till any tension, believeable motivation or even logical flow becomes lost in confusion.

The show opens with a burst of well-directed energy which carries the first few scenes with reasonable crispness. Animation leaps from the opening number, a mock funeral for the tyrannical and bigoted Ol' Cap'n Cotchipee (Christopher Charron); the actors bounce cheerfully through the rather simplistic choreography, though the Old Library stage affords little room for 20 dancers to swing. Things seem fine through the establishment of a few basic plot premises.

Purlie Victorious Judson (Lance LaVergne), an idealistic young Black preacher who dreams of buying and then integrating a church, brings Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins (Wendy Jamerson), a simpleminded kitchen maid, to town to masquerade as his college-educated cousin Bea. In that guise, Purlie hopes, she can collect from Cap'n Cotchipee the $500 he has held in trust for the real Bea's dead mother. Purlie wants the money to found his church, but when he falls in love with Lutiebelle he runs into a snag. So does the production.

As soon as the plot develops beyond this point, Porter and his cast lose control over it. Confronted with the need to establish real contact between characters, create atmosphere, or sustain a joke beyond its original gag, nearly all the leading actors falter. In an early courting scene LaVergne and Jamerson stand together uncomfortably, tossing ambiguous comments back and forth, devoid of mood or any apparent emotional contact. Later the ecstatic Lutiebelle launches into "I Got Love," a song affirming her brand-new confidence, without having evinced even the subtlest change in bearing.

Only Ronald Brown, as Gitlow Judson, avoids the pervasive half-hearted mugging and posturing. Judson, Purlie's feisty brother-in-law, retains influence over Ol' Cap'n by posing as the stereotypical obsequious cotton-picker. Brown swaggers and staggers through the play's increasingly disjointed action with true comic aplomb, bawling "There's More Than One Way of Skinnin' a Cat" with reckless disregard for his tone-deafness, and applying his sense of dramatic timing to the moments that his cohorts largely let slip.

Unfortunately, such assurance only makes others' lack of depth more painfully obvious. Charron as the Cap'n is too busy mugging to create even a convincing caricature of the traditional Southern bigot, though Jeremy Rabinovitz contorts his own face to better effect as Cotchipee's wimpy-yet-enlightened son. As these two and others draw Purlie into more and more awkward predicaments, one realizes LaVergne's repertoire of emotions is limited to a few gestures--a frown and shake of the head for disappointment, and a recurrent toss of the shoulders to suggest the determined faith that is ostensibly Purlie's defining characteristic.

Until the first climatic moments, the brisk plot and dialogue at least carry the audience along. But a swift downhill progression ensues, virtually eliminating all dramatic tension. When the ignorant Lutiebelle, having passed herself off as Cousin Bea, mistakenly signs a receipt for the $500 with her own name instead of Bea's--a costly gaffe to Purlie's dreams--the actors don't play the moment wrong; they simply don't play it at all. Charron glances at the check, looks at his son, and says, "Charlie get the sheriff" without so much as blinking

LaVERGNE and company have a bit more success with Purlie's intermittent scenes of serious philosophy. The portrait of the racially divided rural South ("split like a fat man's underwear") is often genuinely moving. LaVergne's accomplished declamatory style spruces his long, fiery sermons--giving his dreams of an integrated congregation and a valley of Black workers finally free from debt a poignancy and urgency that is Purlie's strongest point.

But ultimately, the awkward script undermines Purlie's message. Oddly placed one-liners mar serious moments; incongruous scenes paint Purlie a fool or a liar after his most moving and far-reaching sermons. The grand climax exemplifies this confusion. Purlie, finally ensconced in his church, passionately orates the beauties of being Black...before his first integrated audience. The delivery is emotional, the sentiment compelling, except when one tries to reconcile it with Charlie Cotchipee's presence and with the wierd shenanigans that made Purlie's dream come true.

In the end, one is left wondering what exactly the play is about. If Purlie sounded serious all through or confined itself to comedy, instead of constantly undercutting one approach with scrappy intimations of the other, the director and cast could perhaps have forged a performance with more shape. If Porter had worked more on a consistent interpretation of the musical, that shape would be easier to detect. Something must give Purlie its enduring popularity besides the gags and snappy tunes that, even here, brought some viewers to their feet--but, faced with this structureless and contradictory melange, an audience is hard put to guess what.