|
|
Article: 'The Black Star Line': the de-mystification of Marcus Garvey. (play about Jamaican civil rights leader in the 1920s)
- Article from:
- African American Review
- Article date:
- December 22, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 African American Review. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
In the American heartland, Chicago's esteemed Goodman Theater has mounted on its stage The Black Star Line, a play by Charles Smith which offers an overstuffed, untutored view of Marcus Garvey's Back-to-Africa Movement in the 1920s. It is, at best, a pedestrian piece of dramatic execution, an episodic series of scenes driven by a much-too-wordy text that takes itself more seriously than the subject, arbitrarily manipulating facts to reconstruct African American history into a disingenuous docu-drama that never achieves dramatic cohesion. Thus it implodes, rather than explodes, with new revelations to validate its pretense of representing an enlightened point of view. Were ...