Let’s be clear: Penumbra Theatre, the esteemed company from St. Paul, Minn., had nothing to do with the recent, much-ballyhooed wrap-up of “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” But to the extent that the broadcast diva’s farewell has focused public attention on the cultural impact of African Americans on TV, it’s a perfect time for Penumbra’s new drama-with-music, “I Wish You Love,” to land at the Kennedy Center.
“I Wish You Love” travels back to 1957, when “The Nat ‘King’ Cole Show” — a network variety show hosted by Cole, already a major star — was a television milestone. The play, written by Dominic Taylor and directed by Penumbra founder Lou Bellamy, imagines the behind-the-scenes tensions at Cole’s show as the black entertainer skirmishes with network bigwigs who want him, among other things, to segregate his band. The script juxtaposes this saga against the civil rights movement, with a news-anchor character who reports on such events as school desegregation in Little Rock. The play was a smash hit in St. Paul, so much so that Penumbra will reprise it there next season.
“I Wish You Love” features actor Dennis W. Spears as Cole, interpreting “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” “On the Sunny Side of the Street” and nearly 20 other standards. The production also includes period commercials for products such as Brylcreem, a touch that nods to the financial pressures that buffeted the pioneering show. (The “Nat ‘King’ Cole Show” never attracted the sponsorship needed to keep it commercially viable. With advertisers staying skittish, NBC subsidized the show at considerable expense, leaving Cole to say at one point, “I take my hat off to them.”)
The play “is sort of a comment on the media, and the way the American narrative was being constructed during those years,” Bellamy says, pointing out that, thanks to the ad footage, “you see the construction of whiteness in the country, and how sex roles were being taught in commercials, all that kind of stuff.” At the same time, he notes, the news-themed sections of “I Wish You Love” assert that Cole’s embattled workplace was “a microcosm of what [was] going on in the larger society.”
That a Penumbra show incorporates such civic awareness is hardly out of character. Bellamy had a social vision in mind when he founded the company in 1976 as a forum for African American stories in all their complexity. An actor who’d been raised in St. Paul, and who had found his vocation via a college production of “Finian’s Rainbow,” he thought that such stories weren’t getting their theatrical due.
Since then, the company has served up a range of fare, including — to name a few offerings — “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” (a Fats Waller revue), “Zooman and the Sign”(a tale of urban violence by Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Fuller) and “Redshirts” (Dana Yeaton’s drama about a college sports scandal, which Penumbraco produced with Bethesda’s Round House Theatre in 2007).
“This is a theater with a very strong social conscience,” says Rohan Preston, lead theater critic for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “It’s a theater for change. So the conversations that come out of shows that Penumbra puts on are conversations about bettering the lot of the nation as a whole — African Americans in particular, but recognizing that African Americans are not an island in this nation.”
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