Theatre in Review: Purlie Victorious (Music Box Theatre) Purlie Victorious is that rarest of things, a farce about race relations in America, and why not? In the view of the playwright, the late, great Ossie Davis, race relations in America are a farce. Subtitled A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch, this thoroughly unexpected revival of a modest 1961 hit is startling on many counts, not least the way it gives the raspberry to this country's original sin. It centers on an act of fraud, but, by the final curtain, it has exposed as fraudulent nearly everything about the way that white and Black people interact; our thinking about race is a massive con job and we are all the marks. Taking place in the era of Freedom Riders, SNCC, and Dr. King, Purlie Victorious unfolds on a Georgia cotton plantation run along lines that Margaret Mitchell would appreciate. The Black sharecroppers who toil there are in perpetual debt to Ol' Cap'n Cotchipee, owner of both the land and the local commissary where he charges extortionate prices. The title character, who was run off the place twenty years earlier after a whipping from Cap'n Cotchipee, has returned, having matured into a self-invented preacher with a talent for working all the angles. ("Last time you was a professor of Nego Philosophy," notes his sister-in-law Missy, meaningfully.) Purlie has in tow the winsome Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins, a wide-eyed kitchen maid he intends to pass off as his cousin Beatrice, coming home from up North to claim a $500 legacy that Cotichipee is holding. (The real Beatrice passed away, necessitating the substitution.) Driving the action with furious energy is Leslie Odom, Jr. as Purlie. With a smile worth far more than $500 and a Biblical way with words, he can whip his accomplices into a moral fervor while simultaneously plotting the details of his grand deception. To be sure, the money rightfully belongs to his family, all of whom are stuck in a form of economic slavery. "Freedom is my business," Purlie says, and business is what he means. Whether elaborately confessing to a murder he didn't commit, gleefully urging a woman to give her husband a good bop on the head, or riding the rapids of his character's torrential oratorical style, Odom delivers a full-out star performance, going a step beyond his incisive work as Hamilton's Aaron Burr to take full possession of center stage. Kara Young turns partner-in-crime Lutiebelle into her own comic creation, one-part yokel and one-part screwball. The personification of the sweet young thing -- hesitant, unschooled, and polite to her elders -- she harbors a needle-sharp wit under her honeyed manners. Waxing ecstatically about life's small pleasures, including quilting bee parties and barbeques, she sighs, "Life is so good to us -- sometimes;" the precise timing of that last word, delivered a half-step lower, is flawless. She possesses a nimble farce technique, especially when, dressed up in a smart suit, she tries to impersonate the college-educated Beatrice, slinking around the stage in a thoroughly inadequate simulacrum of sophistication. Check out her demure smile while forging a signature on a receipt. Note how, warning she is about to faint, she throws herself on a chair, bouncing back up like a rubber ball to instantly announce her fury. And wait for her full-body response to a spontaneous kiss from Purlie, who only belatedly realizes she is the woman for him. For all her feistiness, Lutiebelle is terrified by Purlie's plan, which, she notes, involves pretending to be someone else in front of white folks. To which Purlie replies, "Why not? Some of the best pretending in the world is done in front of white folks." This notion is backed up by the sterling supporting cast, beginning with Billy Eugene Jones as Purlie's brother Gitlow, whose suave Uncle Tom routine -- up to and including duets of "Old Black Joe" -- is hilariously transparent to all but Cap'n Cotchipee. Adding cheerful notes to Purlie's chicanery are Heather Alicia Simms as Missy, getting infinite meanings out of "I know" in response to a rapid-fire series of propositions from Purlie, and Vanessa Bell Calloway as the servant who brings Cap'n Cotchipee to heel with her culinary prowess. As the latter character, Jay O. Sanders, decked out like Colonel Sanders and sporting plenty of facial hair, resembles an apoplectic polar bear, frantically defending "the economic foundation of the southland" and roaring, "You trying to get non-violent with me, boy?" at his liberal son (a genial Noah Robbins). Indeed, everyone in Purlie Victorious is, to one degree or another, caught up in supporting the lie of white supremacy and one of the funniest things about Kenny Leon's production is how smoothly the Black characters play their parts, needing only a pregnant pause or nod of the head to expose the artifice that keeps them oppressed. (As Missy tells Lutiebelle, "Oh, child, being colored can be a lotta fun when ain't nobody looking.") Leon stages these proceedings in a slam-bang manner, adding a strong note of melodrama if only to stress the bitter injustice under the laughter, brazenly deploying characters who, at first glance, look like utter stereotypes, letting their masks slip a little more in each scene. The production design is rooted in a similar mixture of humor and grit. Derek McLane's set, a forced-perspective box made of untreated wood, looks a tad dreary at first glance but quickly reveals itself to be a magical contraption that converts into several interiors, executing a (literally) roof-raising transformation into the chapel that Purlie has pledged to save. Adam Honoré makes good use of back- and sidelight for several time-of-day looks, including a flood of daffodil-colored sunshine; a night-time candelit effect is especially striking. Emilio Sosa's costumes have a strong period feel and sound designer Peter Fitzgerald combines banjo tunes with effects like crickets, thunder, and birds in flight. I went into Purlie Victorious wondering if it might not feel dated or off-topic in terms of today's politics; I left in awe of the script's vigor, its distinctive mix of hilarity and righteous anger, and its insistence that, when it comes to racial injustice, we're all in it together. After a couple of seasons of plays filled with despair and anguish, Davis' humor has a bracing effect; countering evil with ridicule, he diminishes it, robbing it of its power. It's a weapon more playwrights could stand to wield. --David Barbour 
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