Rachel Nicks, LeRoy McClain and Curtis McClarin (foreground)
and J. Bernard Calloway (standing) in a scene from The Good Negro
(Photo credit: Joan Marcus)

The dramatic form called the docudrama hasn’t been much used of late by American playwrights. However, in writing The Good Negro, a fictionalized account of the civil rights movement in Birmingham, circa 1962-3, Tracey Scott Wilson demonstrates how powerful a form it can be. Directing a co-production between the Public Theater and the Dallas Theater Center, Liesl Tommy has placed a riveting evening of drama front and center. An excellent cast led by Curtis McClarin as a civil rights leader reminiscent of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., keeps the audience on the edge of its seats even though the outcome is historical fact.

Clint Ramos’ setting which has four playing simultaneously on stage at all times allows for a very cinematic approach to the material, and Tommy has directed the play almost as though we are seeing film cuts, or simultaneous events on a split screen. The play begins in Birmingham, 1962, known as the most segregated city in America, and immediately plunges us into the excesses of that dark era. As we listen to Rev. James Lawrence, an African American civil rights leader newly arrived in the city, call upon his parishioners to keep the faith on one side of the stage, Claudette Sullivan, a young black woman is beaten and arrested for allowing her four year old daughter Shelly to use the “whites only” bathroom of a downtown department store on the other side of the stage.

Shortly after Bill Rutherford, a civil rights organizer most recently living in Geneva, Switzerland, arrives to help Lawrence and his right hand man, Reverend Henry Evans, go up against the bigotry of the police force, the downtown merchants, and the Ku Klux Klan. The three men decide that Sullivan is the “good Negro” that they have been waiting for, educated, well-spoken, presentable and non-political. Her story can be used as a rallying cry to forward the movement.

The play cuts back and forth between the backroom politics of the civil rights movement and the two federal agents sent by the Big Man, (i.e. J. Edgar Hoover), to spy on their work with wire taps. We see the infighting that threatens to destroy the movement as well as the men’s own personal weaknesses and flaws. Lawrence turns out to be a womanizer, Evans is too proud to be a team player, and Rutherford is perceived as too superior to reach out to their followers. The F.B.I. agents hire a local redneck, Gary Thomas Rowe, Jr., to spy on the Ku Klux Klan for them, and this loose cannon becomes a catalyst for much of the action. Things speed up when Pelzie, Claudette’s blue-collar husband, is fired from his job, and eventually Lawrence, Evans and Rutherford decide to use Shelly as the poster child for the movement.

The play’s virtue is that it shows the story from several sides, addressing the fears of both blacks and whites, and it is not afraid to put us in the rooms where the decisions are being made. The Good Negro has an epic sweep, while at the same time telling the intimate and personal stories that make up the bigger drama. The intercutting and overlapping scenes give the play a documentary reality, while also increasing the tension leading up to the ultimate confrontation that will change history forever.

The cast is uniformly excellent although some roles are more fully written than others. An interesting contrast is established by McClarin as the conflicted Lawrence, Leroy McClain as the patronizing Rutherford, and J. Bernard Calloway as the quick to anger Evans. Joniece Abbott-Pratt is heartbreaking as Claudette who sees her private life being pulled apart by her increasingly public stance. Francois Battiste is memorable as her crude but clear thinking husband Pelzie.

Erik Jensen is commanding as the increasingly out of control Rowe who falsely believes that his role as an informant gives him special powers. As Lawrence’s loyal wife Corinne who must deal with the discovery of her husband’s adulteries, Rachel Nicks is always a strong presence. Not surprisingly, the F.B.I. officers played by Quincy Dunn-Baker and Brian Wallace seem blander than the other characters, as they are playing functionaries who must strictly follow orders from above.

Tracey Scott Wilson’s The Good Negro is a long, dense and powerful recreation of an ugly era in American history. Placing us in the backrooms where decisions are being made brings the civil rights movement into sharp focus. The excellent cast shows us Wilson’s characters with all their flaws as well as strengths that eventually lead to social change in America that we now take for granted. Liesl Tommy’s skillful direction turns what might have been a dull history lesson into a riveting evening in the theater.

The Good Negro (through April 19)

The Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, call 212-967-7555 or http://www.publictheater.org