“What Martin Luther King is trying to do with love, I am trying to do in this play with laughter.” —Ossie Davis, 1966
Purlie Victorious is a savvy and satiric look at a Black community of sharecroppers in the Deep South in the late 1950s—during the height of Jim Crow laws, after the Supreme Court had ordered school integration schools but before the state of Georgia showed any inclination to enforce the ruling. Opening on Broadway in 1961, its audience members included a 93-year-old W.E.B. DuBois, Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X (who loved the show. “Black folks laughing at white folks was revolutionary—the highest kind of struggle he could imagine,” related playwright Ossie Davis).
Playwright, actor, and activist Ossie Davis started the play that would become Purlie Victorious in the wake of Emmett Till’s 1955 murder. “I sat at the dining room table far into the night, pencil scratching loud and hard, venting my ancient fury, page after page after page,” he wrote. Working on the play over the next few years, however, he found that drama wasn’t the best form to write about the violence and indignities of life for Black people in the South. As Davis reflected: “the closer I got to the facts…the more ridiculous they became in retrospect.”
This led Davis to take a full turn towards the comic, crafting a play that kept its focus on the injustices of a violently segregated country, but one that aimed its comedy at the ridiculous things American racism forces people to do, the ways it leads them to behave. Davis turned his satirist’s eye on the racist symbols and comic types of American minstrelsy—the accommodating Black servant, the desexualized and caregiving “mammy” type, the fast-talking braggart who doesn’t understand what he’s saying. Davis looked to these stereotypes and saw the strategies they once served—and the resistance, care, and intelligence they held—and turned them back into tools of resistance. As he wrote about the play:
“These were not stereotypes that I created. They were created a long time ago on the plantations and then were taken by white-faced minstrels and emptied of their ammunition and protest and bite and made into something altogether different. I merely tried to bring them back where they belong.” —Ossie Davis, 1966
Director Psalmayene 24 has called this production of Purlie Victorious an “Anti-Minstrel Show”, capitalizing on the way Davis exposes these stereotypes to the sunlight of laughter and finds something resilient and resonant beneath them in his characters. Or as Davis would reflect on the play in 1993, “Purlie Victorious was a comedy aimed at America’s funny bone, it was dead serious in its purpose: to point a mocking finger at racial segregation and laugh it out of existence!”
Read Psalmayene 24’s welcome to the play and its Anti-Minstrel tropes.