City Preacher
By Ed Bullins. Directed by Daniel Gidron. Choreography by Anita Havel. Set design by Brynna Bloomfield. Costumes by Yasmin Dixon. Lighting by Scott Pinkney and Michelle Caron. With Jim Spencer, Jacqui Parker, Kerrie Kitto, Thomas Grimes, Sonya Raye, Darius Williams, Dorien Christian Baucum, Kami Leigh Agard, Anita Havel, Abria Smith, Linda Starks, Peter Brown, Michael Premo, Cyrus McQueen, and Chris Burke. Presented by ACT Roxbury Consortium at the Boston Center for the Arts through December 16.

Surely there’s a drama in the life of Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (1908-1972), one of the more charismatic American figures to emerge before World War II. He was the preacher at one of the most important churches in Harlem, a powerful champion of rights for African-Americans, and one of only two black members of the House of Representatives at his election in 1945. Powell was also a womanizer who was criticized for financial improprieties as well as for his lavish life style. In 1967, he was unseated by his fellow congressmen for misuse of House funds and unbecoming conduct. He was voted back into office by his constituents in a special election later that year, and reinstated by a Supreme Court decision in 1969, but by then his power was gone.

Obie-winning dramatist Ed Bullins has borrowed aspects of Powell’s life for the central character of City Preacher, which was first produced in 1984 and has been revised for this production. The play focuses on a young man Bullins calls Aaron Jackson Price Jr. at the moment when he is called back from a playboy’s life in Europe. His father, Reverend Price, is near death from a stroke, and Aaron is expected to take up the pulpit for which he has been groomed since childhood. The central conflict arises from Aaron’s denial of his heritage in favor of wine, women, and carousing.

But the playwright wants it both ways: he relies on the biography of Powell — or at least its outlines — but changes the story and certainly the moral complexity of the main character. Whatever his human failings, Powell was a defender of his people, unlike Aaron, who seems to have no redeeming virtues. Bullins imbues Aaron with a slimy personality: he’s deceitful, self-absorbed, unfaithful, mean-spirited — and a blasphemer. That’s quite a combination for a man raised in a spiritual household. Although there’s a turn-around at the end, it’s hard to believe that Bullins’s Aaron has greatness in him.

What’s more, many of the other characters are painted in contrasting shades of utter goodness. Sister Beth is a crusading newspaper editor focused on the plight of the poor in Depression-era Harlem; their mother is a soft-spoken, God-fearing woman. Powell’s first wife, Isabel, was a Cotton Club chorus girl whom he married over his father’s objections; here she’s a dancer named Ida who considers herself an artist and is saving her virginity for her husband. It’s more fun to watch the bad girls, like Aaron’s companion Ruby and the one-night-stand who rifles his jacket for cash before stealing off into the night.

One obstacle to making theater out of history is its episodic nature. Bullins has written a chronology rather than coiling his play’s structure to deliver a dramatic punch. The first act drags, with too many short scenes separated by blackouts and a surfeit of exposition as, for the benefit of the audience, characters tell one another things they already know. It’s not until the second act’s opening scene, an encounter in a Harlem nightclub enlivened by a rousing Charleston, that Bullins digs into the material. Director Daniel Gidron’s staging and Bullins’s command of the period and the milieu suggest the possibilities for a play that might emerge.

But the cast never mines the dialogue for its subtext. Although Jim Spencer cuts a lively figure as Aaron, there’s too much emphasis on the raffish qualities and not enough self-knowledge. Jacqui Parker struggles to make Beth into a person rather than a prig; Kerrie Kitto seldom takes Mother Price beyond the preacher’s perfect wife. Sonya Raye as a sassy, effervescent Ruby and Dorien Christian Baucum as Aaron’s loyal friend Yancey (he cuts a mean figure on the Harlem club dance floor) come as a relief.

Bullins has taken off from a little-known period in Powell’s life, after he had been dismissed from City College at the end of his freshman year and had to be rescued by a friend of his father, who arranged his admittance to Colgate University. And the questions raised by City Preacher ring true regarding whether there is freedom of choice, especially for a young man who owes a payback for his life of privilege. Here’s hoping there’s another rewrite in the offing.

Issue Date: December 6-13, 2001

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