ALL I NEED TO GET BY
Marvin Gaye’s life alone would make a poignant drama: the intensely spiritual son of a loving, supportive mother and a violent, alcoholic, ex-minister father, he used his considerable musical gifts to gain the world but in the process lost his soul–to drugs, paranoia, and obsessive sexual healing–before being shot dead by his father in a petty family dispute. Couple his story with the intense life of his gutsy musical partner Tammi Terrell, and you’ve got a formula for a glorious Hollywood-style show-biz bio: earnest, talented young musicians find themselves through their art, achieve some worldly success, then are tragically cut down by the great divider of friends, Death. At the height of their popularity in the late 60s, Terrell was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
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Adapting Gaye and Terrell’s bitterswept tale for the stage in All I Need to Get By, Lephate Cunningham Jr. sugarcoats the story. Cunningham alludes only briefly to Gaye’s stormy relationship with his father and makes no reference whatsoever to the darker strains in Gaye’s character, the scars from his childhood: bouts of self-doubt, crippling stage fright, constant womanizing. But to his credit Cunningham does touch, however gingerly, on Terrell’s history of sick relationships with abusive men. The scene in which she comes perilously close to being beaten by Temptations lead singer David Ruffin is among the most harrowing and powerful in the play.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Roger Lewin-Jennifer Girard Studio.
