216.
DR. DU BOIS AND MISS OVINGTON
The
single greatest benefit to be derived from Clare Coss’s DR. DU BOIS AND MISS
OVINGTON, now at the Castillo Theatre in a production by Woodie King’s New
Federal Theatre with direction by Gabrielle L. Kurlander, is its introduction
to a woman of major significance in America’s struggle for racial equality. To
those knowledgeable about the country’s racial history and the suffragette
movement, the name Mary White Ovington will perhaps be familiar (a Brooklyn public
school, I.S. 30, is named for her), but, before seeing this play, I knew
nothing about this interesting woman, and am grateful for the opportunity
afforded to learn about her.
The
play itself, set in 1915, is little more than an assortment of dramatically
strained scenes between Miss Ovington, who was then 50, and the great black
spokesman for racial equality, Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, who would have been 52. Miss Ovington, a Brooklyn-born
white woman who died in 1951 at 86, was one of the founders of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in 1909. A
Unitarian, she was, as the program note points out, a socialist, feminist, pacifist,
and suffragist; she also was a prolific author. Among her various causes was
the plight of African-Americans at a time when the country was plagued by
racial violence. In fact, President Woodrow Wilson had recently introduced segregation to
Washington, D.C. A prominent part of the set is a wall map of the USA with
markers noting the numerous lynchings of 1915 under the slogan, “Le Us Bear
Witness.”
The
awkwardly written play, filled with historical exposition that sounds like
rhetoric plucked from history books, posits a meeting on a Sunday morning between
Dr. Du Bois and Miss Ovington in the otherwise deserted offices of "The Crisis," which
Du Bois edits. He's intent on resigning from the NAACP unless he can get full
autonomy. She's determined to change his mind because of the importance of
blacks and whites working together (the NAACP leadership was primarily white).
The nearly plotless play ranges across their mutual and differing thoughts on
the controversies of the day, including women’s issues, marriage, the movie
BIRTH OF A NATION, America’s potential entry into World War I (they’re both
pacifists), the notion of blacks joining the armed forces, miscegenation, and the
lack of white financial support in resolving race relations. The play sputters momentarily to life when it hints at the possibility of a love affair between Du Bois and Ovington
(he was married, she was single), but shies away from
it when the pair think better of it (“I would not like to be known as a great
man’s footnote,” she says), and finds a way for them to work together by the
end.
Timothy
Simonson as the temperamental Dr. Du Bois and Kathleen Chalfant as the spirited
but rationalistic Miss Ovington struggle to bring conviction to their cardboard
characters, each of whom is little more than a mouthpiece for historical facts
and ideas. We learn barely anything of them as people, only their political
positions being of interest in this didactic work in which Du Bois, the first
black to get a Ph.D. from Harvard, comes off sounding like a pompous pedant.
Mr. Simonson very slightly resembles Du Bois, but is much lighter skinned (he
could pass for white) and much taller. His acting, however, suggests more the
enthusiastic amateur than the polished professional, and his frequent stumbling
over his words does little to change that impression. Ms. Chalfant, on the other
hand, is a distinguished artist who works her bustle off trying to bring a
semblance of human warmth to her textbook role. She draws on a full arsenal of actor’s
tools but ultimately is defeated by the shallowness of her
material.
Ms. Kurlander’s staging is stiff and
awkward, failing to humanize what is essentially a piece of
historical research expressed in clunky dialogue. She’s
not helped much by Chris Cumberbatch’s cheesy set, showing two offices, one at
the left, one at the right, separated by a piece of wall that is meant to symbolically
demarcate one room from the other but looks instead as though the wall has been
partially demolished. The actors are distractingly forced to go from the stage
right room to the stage left one by passing through an up center door, walking
unseen behind an upstage wall, and then reappearing at another door up left. A
large window at stage right faces a flat with amateurishly painted office
buildings across the street. The inadequate lighting, by Antoinette Tynes, does
little to dispel the feeling that the actors need merely stick their hands out to
open the windows on the other side of Fifth Avenue. Ali Turns’s costumes, with Dr. Du Bois in a seersucker
suit, and Miss Ovington in full skirt and white blouse, do an adequate job of representing the period.
DR. DU BOIS AND MISS OVINGTON, which
runs an intermissionless 90 minutes or so, is a well-meaning work. However,
apart from the professionalism brought to it by Miss Chalfant, it's dramatically
insipid, failing to rise to anywhere near the level of its subject matter.
