Black Star Line
The trouble with Charles Smith’s stunningly ambitious but somewhat too scholarly biography and Tazewell Thompson’s exceedingly well acted Goodman Theatre staging is that Garvey emerges not as rich and complex but as contradictory: it’s impossible to get a handle on him. Smith writes in his program notes, “The more research I did, the more I began to understand that there was no absolute truth to which I could adhere….So I did the only thing I could do, and that was research the commonly and not so commonly held perceptions regarding Garvey. The result, Black Star Line, is my only perception.” Smith is perhaps to be commended for his candor, but the implication is that he hasn’t completely made up his mind about Garvey, who he was and why he was that way. Garvey is referred to in the press materials as a character of Shakespearean proportions. But, to borrow from Laurence Olivier, Shakespeare may have written the tragedy of a man who couldn’t make up his mind; he wasn’t a playwright who couldn’t make up his mind himself.
