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A Vintage Satire That Still Has Sting: Purlie Victorious Returns
Ossie Davis’s plantation farce retains its wit and snap.
He’s going to buy the town’s old church, Big Bethel, set up shop in its pulpit, and liberate his friends and neighbors from the tyranny of Ol’ Cap’n Cotchipee (Jay O. Sanders), the linen-wearing, whip-wielding landowner in the big white house up the hill who has essentially re-enslaved the local sharecroppers through debt and who lives his life according to the credo “God is still a white man.” Crucial to Purlie’s scheme are his brother, Gitlow (Billy Eugene Jones); his sister-in-law, Missy (Heather Alicia Simms); and especially the young protégée he has taken under his wing, Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins (Kara Young). Young creates a woman who’s essentially sitting on top of a geyser: There’s the decorous mask she has been trained to present, especially to white folks like her former employer Miz Emmylou, and then there are the absolute torrents of awe, desire, and her own divine impatience that rumble under the surface, shooting out in rainbows every time they find a crack. Heather Alicia Simms and Vanessa Bell Calloway are both sharp, witty, and poignant without sentimentality as the play’s two matriarchal figures, the formidable Missy Judson and Idella Landy, the wry, worldly-wise housekeeper who essentially raised Charlie.
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