Metropolitan Playhouse
The American Legacy
The American Legacy
"Theatrical
archaeologist extraordinaire" - - Back Stage
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Metropolitan Playhouse
The American Legacy "Theatrical
archaeologist extraordinaire" - - Back Stage
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| Deep
Are the Roots |
| Racism
in America is as thorny and tangled as any weed in our
cultural soil. Hopeful descriptions in recent years
of a “post-racial” America met immediate derision as
naïve fantasies at best, and insidious assertions of
a racist status quo at worst. Can theater help pull
out such a perennially poisonous plant? In 1945, Arnaud d’Usseau and James Gow— with Elia Kazan’s direction and Barbara Bel Geddes, Gordon Heath, and Charles Waldron in the leads—brought a play to Broadway that sought to attack racism head on. The play ran nearly 500 performances, and its 1960 revival Off-Broadway was hailed for "lash[ing] out at racial inequality with undiminished fury.” Deep Are the Roots boldly accuses American society of an intractable commitment to its racial divide, and digs down to find antipathy’s deepest roots—not in the history that engendered it, but in the souls of the vivid and varied characters who continue to cultivate it. Brett Charles, a decorated, African American lieutenant in the US Army, returns from World War II to his childhood home: the Deep Southern mansion of a former US Senator. Brett was raised there as the son of a housekeeper, but while Southern town life has stood still, he has been transformed. Embraced by European citizens as a hero, befriended by white fellow officers, emboldened by military honors, he sees a world beyond the black and white confines to which he returns. The community has different expectations: his mother and the Senator expect him to “keep his place”, as God and Society require. The Senator’s progressive eldest daughter, supportive of his “improvement,” expects to usher him along the path to higher education, whatever his own ambitions might be. And the hide-bound citizens of the town see his new-found selfrespect as outright intimidation. But when he and the Senator’s younger daughter, childhood friends now grown to adulthood, recognize their blossoming love for one another, unease with a changing world quickly explodes into something far darker. Elegant, witty, angry, and moving, Deep Are the Roots is both a thoughtful dissection of deep inter-racial hostilities, and an impassioned appeal for justice and humanity. It is great theater. Charting journeys of self-discovery in each character, some of whom aspire to humanity and understanding, others who deepen their investment in bigotry and conflict, the play asks troubling questions that surely have yet to be answered, today. Time...and Again Deep Are the Roots was written in the predawn of the Civil Rights Era—before the bus boycott, the marches to Montgomery, and the lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro. 1945 was nine years before Brown vs. the Board of Education and nineteen before the Civil Rights Act. (It was also only two years after Paul Robeson as Othello kissed Uta Hagen’s Desdemona on Broadway.) As always at Metropolitan, our production seeks to know the play in part as a piece of that time. It incisively evokes the social attitudes of 1945, and they set a bright light on our own. Both where the play seems naïve, and where it is disturbingly prescient, it is a vivid document of our cultural past that is surprisingly true to our present. At the same time, thanks to its inspired collection of characters, the play resonates with issues well beyond its particular focus in 1945. Regarding its central themes, the recent films Red Tails and The Help show very different but current inquiries into our country's mid-century struggles with inequality based on race in a changing world. Among the roots of other antagonisms it unearths are power claimed and denied between men and women; the influence wielded by the wealthy over the poor; the capacity for self-delusion in even the most well-meaning; and the potential for incendiary conflict when the self-righteous meet the self-protective. Above all, the play draws a clear picture of a community’s fear in the face of irresistible change. The Langdon household’s reception of its honored son is hauntingly familiar in our country’s current debates over immigration policy and its treatment of growing minority groups, from Hispanic to Arab. Interracial hostility is confoundingly entwined with community division, both feeding and fed by differences in status, power, and, in the end, freedom. In this spirit, Metropolitan proudly revives the play as the third of four mainstage productions in a season devoted to exploring Class in America. - Alex Roe |
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Arnaud d'Usseau
(1916-1990) and James
Gow (1907-1952) were repeat collaborators, best
known to most of us for Tomorrow The
World (1943), a thriller later made into a
popular filmabout an American family raising a Nazi-indoctrinated
German child. In 1950 they tried their hands at a comedy:
The Legend of Sarah.
D'Usseau also collaborated with Dorothy Parker on the play Ladies of the Corridor, but his own numerous screenplays, showed a penchant for the sensational, and included One Crowded Night, Lady Scarface, and The Man Who Wouldn't Die. Blacklisted in 1950 as a Communist sympathizer, he appeared before Joseph McCarthy's Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1953, where he refused to testify in a confrontation testy enough that McCarthy threatened to have him forcibly removed from the proceedings. He removed to France and Spain for some years, where he continued writing screenplays under various pseudonyms, eventually returning to the United States where he concluded his career teaching writing at NYU. Gow, who died at age 44, was also a screenwriter in his own right, active in the 30's and 40's, whose credits include Moonlight in Hawaii, Bunker Bean, Murder on a Bridle Path, and I Dream Too Much. |
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