![]() “I really looked forward to doing things like that,” says Alexander. Despite the racially charged subject matter, Alexander had no hesitation about diving headlong into the material. Photo by Harry Benson / Daily Express / Getty Imagesįor the role of Bachman, Sherin went with an existing member of the Arena Stage company: actress Jane Alexander, who would later become Sherin’s wife. James Earl Jones looks at his reflection in a Broadway dressing room mirror on December 10, 1968. “In fact, the young man who was my understudy onstage, Yaphet Kotto, resembled Jack much more than I did.” ![]() "Howard suggested that I start getting into shape, which was really important -the man was a boxer -but which I was not and am not and will never be!” says Jones, laughing. To find the right man for Jefferson, Sackler reached out to actor James Earl Jones, an established performer was working in Europe. theater, which at the time was best known for being the first integrated theater in the city. The Great White Hope began with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to Arena Stage, a Washington, D.C. ![]() He wrote a play about a tragic hero, somebody who oversteps himself-as Coriolanus did.” And it taps off white guilt about the way the black man was dealt with, but that was not position at all. The historical circumstances made that the paramount issue in the play. “And in mind, it wasn’t about black-white. “It’s about a man who essentially moves out of his tribe and gets clobbered,” Sherin told The American Theatre in 2000. Sackler drew inspiration from these events, seeing in Johnson an opportunity to tell a story about a man who becomes a hero but is nonetheless destined for a downfall, someone who many-including the play’s director, Ed Sherin-likened to the titular character in William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Sullivan told the New York Times, “Scarcely has there ever been a championship contest that was so one-sided.” Upon being wooed into returning to the ring, Jeffries made his reasons perfectly clear, publicly announcing, "I am going into this fight for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro.”Īs history reveals, Jeffries proved no such thing: not only did Johnson win the fight by a technical knockout in round 15, but as fellow boxer John L. The play’s title came from the descriptor assigned decades earlier to any white boxer who stepped into the ring to challenge Johnson, although it was most famously used to describe Jeffries, who had retired from the ring more than five years before the landmark fight. In addition to mirroring the tensions Johnson and Duryea endured in pursuing an interracial relationship during the early 20th century, Eleanor’s ultimate fate mirrors that of Duryea, who died by suicide in 1912. In addition to developing a story which focused on an equivalent of the Johnson-Jeffries fight, Sackler constructed a storyline based on the relationship between Johnson and his first wife, a white woman named, Etta Terry Duryea, represented in the play by the character of Eleanor Bachman. In The Great White Hope, black boxer Jack Jefferson-a name change borne out of legal concerns-becomes so successful that a fight is set up between Jefferson and the reigning heavyweight champion of the world, a white man. Sackler’s much-lauded play arrived in 1967, as the civil rights movement’s struggles were at last bearing fruit. Photo by Afro American Newspapers / Gado / Getty Images That said, both served to launch the careers of two actors on the rise and brought to the public a poignant story of interracial romance and the struggle for interracial couples to find acceptance in America.Īlexander and Jones in a publicity still from the 1970 film The play’s message about the nature of racism and racial conflict succeeded in providing audiences with an opportunity to better understand different perspectives through the prism of its characters, but the film adaptation failed to deliver the same powerhouse impact. That work of historical fiction, by playwright Howard Sackler, perhaps reveals more about the time in which it was written than the time in which it is set. Jeffries in 1910, would have known Jackson’s story through the play and movie The Great White Hope. His 2005 series “Unforgivable Blackness,” brought the true story of the life and career of Jack Johnson, the black boxer who fought his way up through the pugilism ranks to become the world heavyweight champion, to television.īut before Burns, those who weren’t around for the so-called “Fight of the Century” that saw Johnson outslug James J. “There's nothing you need to make up about Jack Johnson.”ĭocumentarian Ken Burns would know.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |