Word: robeson
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...Robeson became acutely aware that he was a man of the world at a time when most of the good things the world had to offer were denied to all but a handful of other black Americans. So he gave up his comfortable niche in the European artistic community to crusade for a future in which all blacks could participate in the community of man. More and more convinced that this community would be the work of the common people, the poor, working people he had met all over the globe, and impressed with the Soviet Union's championing...
Ironically, the price that Robeson paid for that vision was his own freedom to perform and travel as a man of all nations. In the heat of McCarthyism, the State Department began denying him visas to travel abroad to accept the performing offers that continued to pour in from around the globe. On June 12, 1956, he was called up before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and badgered about his ties to the Communist Party. America gave Robeson little peace in his last decade, and he had every right to turn bitter and resentful...
...portray Robeson's odyssey on the stage, to try to convey his aspirations and his frustrations, to dramatize what Robeson meant when at the end of his life he quoted a statement by Frederick Douglass--"A man is worked on by what he works on. He may carve out his circumstances, but his circumstances carve him out as well"--is a difficult touchy task. To say that playwright Philip Hayes Dean's one-man play, Paul Robeson, starring James Earl Jones and directed by Charles Nelson Reilly, does as sensitive a job as could have been done, given the format...
...hard to see how Paul Robeson could be more faithful, more meaningful, more true to Robeson's spirit, without dragging on to the kind of lengths that would be needed to truly plumb the depths of his complex, conflicted personality, or else haranguing the audience with political invective. Neither of which would sell tickets. So, predictably, Paul Robeson simply cashes in on conventions now well established in a recent rash of one-man shows--a recognizable actor in the starring role, plenty of humorous or touching memories, an emphasis on personality rather than on social forces and constraints--in short...
...there is to say about Paul Robeson can thus be summed up in a few lines. The play follows Robeson's life chronologically and, in terms of events, faithfully. James Earl Jones, as Robeson, is irresistably charming, though perhaps too irresistably charming, he makes such clever fun of the bigotry and ignorance that surrounded Robeson as he ventured into the world in the first half of the play that it is difficult to fully believe in the rage he vents in the second half. Jones imitates Robeson's resounding baritone well, if not remarkably, and also powerfully enacts a scene...