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| Marcella Lowery, Arnold Johnson, Roxie Roker. |
JAMIMMA [Comedy-Drama/Drugs/Race]
A: Martin Evans-Charles; D: Shauneille Perry; S: C. Richard Mills; C: Edna
Watson; L: Shirley Prendergast; P: Woodie King, Jr., and Dick Williams; T: New
Federal Theatre (OB); 5/15/72-6/25/72 (48)
A brief Off-Off Broadway run in March 1972 preceded the move
of Jamimma to this regular
Off-Broadway production. Taking place in a Harlem apartment, Martin
Charles-Evans’s very loosely plotted drama offered its performers opportunities
for interesting character portrayals. The chief persons included Jameena (Marcella Lowery), a young, Black seamstress who prefers her part-time
job to going into business for herself; her philandering, drummer boyfriend,
Omar Butler I (Dick Williams); a predatory neighbor, Vivian Williams (Lucretia
R. Collins),who deals drugs and hankers for the drummer; and an oddball
janitor, Crazy Man Johnson (Arnold Johnson), whose teenage son dies of an
overdose.
Martin Washburn was disturbed by the lack of depth in the
characters’ relationships, but Howard Thompson praised Jamimma as “a toughly affectionate, wryly perceptive play about
black people—caring, colliding, and clashing—that is genuinely engrossing”
despite its unfocused development. The work was well staged and decently
performed, observed Edith Oliver, who concluded, “I found much of the play
remote, but I also found it better than merely promising.”
Charles Weldon and Roxie Roker were amont the cast members.
