Spencertown Academy’s Works in Progress series is organized  by Spencertown’s  Karen Jahn, and spotlights the works of local authors.  It brings fresh, new manuscripts to the stage and provides an opportunity for the community to preview works in progress in an intimate setting. A reception with the writers and actors follows each production. The third reading in the series is Essie and Roe, a screenplay written by Rose Ross and Elizabeth Wilen-Berg.

Out of Pain, Laughter

by Karen Jahn

In Dark Meat on a Funny Mind writer Wesley Brown (pictured left) revives Richard Pryor in a  new play to be read by actors, Kevin Craig West and Derrick Maul.
  

Having caught Pryor’s act at the Bitter End in the Village in 1970, Brown was intrigued and returned many times. Brown delighted in Pryor’s language, both body and words, bringing forth his outrageous characters in black vernacular, startling in its wit and its coming out on stage.

At first Pryor had a bit of Bill Cosby, the current rising black comedian, in his act. But gradually he left jokes behind. As Bill Cosby commented, “I was in the audience when Richard took on a whole new persona—his own, in front of me and everyone else. Richard killed the Bill Cosby in his act, made people hate it. Then he worked on them, doing pure Richard Pryor, and it was the most astonishing metamorphosis I have ever seen. He was magnificent.” Like the drummers he so admires for putting their whole self in, Pryor uses his body, voice, face, and street talking mouth to tell his stories. This is the Pryor Brown emulates in Dark Meat.

Brown’s play starts with Richard Pryor alone in his wheel chair, confined by his MS to an isolation he has always fled. Beginning with his traumatic childhood, Pryor has always escaped these boundaries through his imagination. Brown has him imagine himself back in his dynamic body, vibrant voice, doing his comedy.

 Although Brown studied the biographies, critics, and autobiography as well as the comedy albums and films, he didn’t use Pryor’s routines. Instead he imagined situations from Pryor’s life including the dilemma of being trapped in a wheelchair and created Pryor-like riffs that acknowledge the pain but turn it inside out into humor. This was the major challenge in writing Dark Meat, to get Pryor’s voice and take and try to create his comedy.

A Professor Emeritus of English from Rutgers University, Wesley Brown has never stopped writing. Three novels—Tragic Magic, 1978, Darktown Strutters, 1994, and Push Comes to Shove, 2008; two plays—Boogie Woogie and Booker T., and Life During Wartime, 1992—screenplay W.E.B. DuBois, A Biography in Four Voices, 1996—and editing two major multicultural collections with the late Professor Amy Ling 1991-2 mark his career. Brown has also directed the program for the Academy’s Festival of Books, securing and interviewing diverse significant writers for our community.

While not yet in full production, Dark Meat has been steadily revised over the past year and half, most recently when Wesley Brown was visiting friends in Tel Aviv. Mr. Brown has a reading planned for New York this summer. Please join us for this magical coda to Richard Pryor’s comic life.

From reports of Hudson Valley Theatre Collaborative who have critiqued his play in process, Brown has succeeded uproariously. But then again, like Pryor he also deals with the dreadful reality of racism, sexism, and death. Dark Meat on a Funny Mind shows how comedy can transform pain.

WORKS IN PROGRESS SERIES

Dark Meat on a Funny Mind is the second in a series of three spoken word productions exploring new work by local writers.  Works In Progress continues on Saturday June 5th with Essie and Roe a screenplay by Rose Ross and Elizabeth Wilen-Berg. The series was organized by Karen Jahn.