Word: johnsons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Happy-Go-Unlucky. For more than half the evening Mister Johnson rather recalls The Teahouse of the August Moon, perhaps because Robert Lewis ably directed both plays. There is a like comedy of nationalities, a comparable use of picturesque detail; in one play a needed road is stalled in red tape, in the other it is a needed schoolhouse; in one, an engaging young native sage holds forth, in the other it is an engaging young native duffer. But the difference between the two plays' titles helps explain their enormous eventual difference in tone. Mister Johnson is really, from...
...Mister Johnson (adapted from Joyce Gary's novel by Norman Rosten) is a young West African Negro who has become a British government clerk and yearns to be a full-fledged, "civilized," Christian Briton. But, even in his bumbling and his guile, the sunny-natured, light-fingered, childlike clerk is miles from his models. An orphan of two cultures, he carries a furled umbrella while walking barefoot, with his patent leather pumps hanging about his neck...
...sure, in the thorny matter of getting a road built, it is Mister Johnson who finds the answer-but in so un-British a fashion as to get sacked. Then, in a moment of drunken confusion, he inadvertently kills a storekeeper he is trying to rob, and mercy can find no legal way to season justice...
...play, Mister Johnson's death has not quite enough of Mister Johnson's life behind it, and seems, though genuinely moving, a little bit wheeled into place. Yet the play's great and steady virtue is that Mister Johnson is always flesh and blood and not just a personalized symbol. It is also a great virtue of the production that Earle Hyman plays the role with particular suppleness as well as appeal. As Mister Johnson's heartsick British judge and executioner, William Sylvester plays well too, and William and Jean Eckart have evocatively mounted the play...
Displaced Narrative. In portraying its altogether central figure, the play resorts, as perhaps it must, to peculiarly centrifugal stagecraft. There are too many episodes that, if vivid, are sketchy, hurried, discontinuous, that seem flashes of ethnic scenery rather than stretches of dramatic mileage. Mister Johnson not only concerns a man who cannot keep to the road; it unfolds its story with almost no road to keep to. It comes off a kind of displaced narrative: as Mister Johnson emerges neither native nor British, Mister Johnson emerges neither novel nor play. But if too fragmented and saltatory, it yields...