THE AFRICAN COMPANY PRESENTS RICHARD III
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The thing Brown’s drama has going for it is the largely overlooked history of America’s first black theater company. In the early part of the 19th century, in Greenwich Village, William Brown established the African Company, the resident troupe at his African Grove Theater, performing both original works and Shakespearean dramas–much to the dismay of New York’s white “legitimate” theater community, whose audiences were depleted by the African Company’s successful “amateur” productions. Only a few years after the African Company was formed, irate Caucaslan theater folk succeeded in having the company members arrested and the theater labeled a public nuisance and shut down.
Brown dramatizes these conflicts by focusing on the African Company’s decision to continue performing Richard III even as the whiteowned Park Theater plans its own production of the same play, starring the legendary Junius Booth. The Park Theater’s Stephen Price, who uses verbal threats and bribery to try to get the African Company to cease production, finally enlists the aid of a boneheaded Irish constable to close the African Grove and frame its defiant members for a fracas there, getting them tossed into the Eldridge Street jail.
It’s also unclear whether the African Company’s portrayals of Shakespeare are meant to reveal brilliant amateurs or hapless dilettantes. In their mouths the words of the Bard are frequently clunky, and it’s a clunkiness that doesn’t always seem intentional. As Richard, Van Lear’s Hewlett is a rather credible Hamlet, somehow managing to make his character seem more misunderstood and misled than psychopathic and evil. The best performance of the lot comes from the magisterial Jim Jackson as Papa Shakespeare: he sounds more Shakespearean than anyone else, especially when not reciting his part.
