Through February 22
PAUL ROBESON SPEAKS OUT Buffalo Ensemble Theatre and Subversive
Theatre Collective/New Phoenix Theatre in the Park
By Augustine Warner
He was one of the Renaissance men of the 20th Century: athlete,
scholar, lawyer, entertainer and political activist, known across the
world.
And, Paul Robeson is nearly forgotten today.
He was Black and that’s certainly part of the reason.
He was also a believer in Stalin’s Soviet Union and that is a real stain
on anyone’s political attitude, today.
Besides, Robeson abandoned the world’s stage when an FBI-orchestrated
campaign
and the McCarthyism of the House Un-American Activities Committee made him
box office poison.
He eventually retreated to his sister’s home in Philadelphia and went
into seclusion until his death in 1976.
Since then, he has been rehabilitated, a little, with admission to the
College Football Hall of Fame, the survival of some of his recordings and
a recent book about the man who was his father, by Paul Robeson Jr.
Now, Robeson the father is on stage again, in Philip Hayes Dean’s “Paul
Robeson Speaks Out,” in the New Phoenix Theatre in the Park.
The excessively long and occasionally dragging one-man show is getting a
wonderful performance from a prize local actor, Willie W. Judson, Jr., who
has been marvelous in just about anything I have seen him in.
Ironically, one of Robeson’s most famous roles was in Eugene
O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones,” perhaps Judson’s most
famous local role for the Irish Classical Theatre Company.
The tall and lanky Judson really doesn’t look much like Robeson and
certainly can’t sing as well.
Yet, that’s not the issue.
The question is if he can re-create the sense of the minister’s son who
became one of the most famous and most visible men on the planet, in those
last years before World War II.
That Judson certainly can do, creating a sense of the man.
In that Jim Crow era, Robeson was an angry man by the time he arrived at
Rutgers University and he carried that anger all of his life, helped along
by the continuing incidents of discrimination throughout his life.
Perhaps the biggest problem with the show is that so few people today
really know what it’s all about, not just the ignorance about Robeson,
but also the times which dominated his life, whether the Broadway stage of
the Twenties, the Spanish Civil War or the red-baiting years in the late
Forties or the Fifties.
Too often to a younger audience, he’s just a faded name in a history
book they don’t want to read.
That’s really too bad because Robeson broke barriers.
Just look at the spectacle of football’s Super Bowl and ask what the
game would be like if it featured only White players?
Or, look at the current entertainment scene and ask what it would be like
only with White performers or some with black-painted faces?
Or, what would the political scene be without Charley Rangel or Maxine
Waters?
Maybe someone else would have broken those barriers, but Paul Robeson did.
Theater looks ahead and it can also look back and shape understanding.
Can politics be understood without Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.”
We’ve forgotten Paul Robeson.
That’s more than unfortunate, it’s awful.
That’s why a trip down to the New Phoenix is so important.
“Paul Robeson Speaks Out” speaks to our time.