The new play “Stokely: The Unfinished Revolution,” receiving its world premiere at the Court Theatre, represents a bold effort to revivify the legacy of an essential, and highly controversial, figure in the Civil Rights movement.
Stokely Carmichael, who later changed his name to Kwame Ture, started participating in the Freedom Rides in 1961, when he was a student at Howard University. After he graduated, he returned to the South to continue registering Black voters. Arrested and beaten dozens of times — once spending a month in jail for nothing more than using a whites-only bathroom — he took over the leadership of the colleges-based Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1966.
He also became a leader in the Black Panther Party and coined, or at least popularized, the phrase “Black Power,” renouncing nonviolence as a tactic. In that regard, he separated himself from Martin Luther King Jr.’s approach, but the two unquestionably respected each other, and Carmichael influenced King in speaking out against the Vietnam War.
Under intense surveillance as well as a target of a massive misinformation campaign by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and receiving regular death threats, Carmichael moved to Africa in 1968 to create a Pan-African movement. A revolutionary to the end, he died of prostate cancer 30 years later, at the age of 57.
The timing of reconsidering Carmichael’s legacy seems right, following the movements spurred by the killing of George Floyd. And as a theatrical subject, Carmichael makes much sense. Drama thrives on conflict, and if one thing can be said of Stokely Carmichael, it’s that he most certainly didn’t shy away from clashes, or provocative ideas.
Why, then, does this play feel fundamentally drama-free?
There is genuine aesthetic ambition and beauty here. Playwright Nambi E. Kelley provides a lyrical, non-linear take on Carmichael’s life, crafting a memory play that skips around in time, flashing back from his dying days in Guinea.
In that framing device, Stokely (at that point Kwame Ture, and played at all ages by Anthony Irons), tries to convince his mother May (Wandachristine) to lead an institute on his work after his death, which doctors have informed him will be imminent. Often holding a tape recorder, he remembers his life story, with some memories coming more easily than others.
The production from director Tasia A. Jones has a graceful fluidity, and the ensemble delivers deeply engaged performances that, all together, emanate a mournful, elegiac emotion. The show instantly embraces Stokely Carmichael as a dying man, and as a precocious kid in Trinidad, where he was raised by his grandmother Cecilia (Dee Dee Batteast) for years before his parents brought him to New York at the age of 11.
There are plenty of quick moments of tension — such as Stokely insisting to his father that he would attend Howard University rather than Harvard, or discussing nonviolence and Vietnam with Martin Luther King Jr. Both of those parts are played by Kelvin Roston Jr., and he and Melanie Brezill are infinitely compelling jumping from one character to another as we see Stokely meeting influences such as Bayard Rustin and fellow activist Fannie Lou Hamer, who steels him to be ready for much human loss.
Kelley and Jones visualize the protests, arrests and police violence largely through movement, and not infrequently, we see a flash of light and hear a gunshot, representing yet another assassination, many of them Carmichael’s personal friends.
Kelley certainly succeeds in humanizing Carmichael and making him sympathetic, but she never quite manages to show us what made him both so remarkably charismatic and, from the government’s perspective, so potentially dangerous. There are moments of oratory, with a speech culminating in a chant of Black Power at the end, but there are barely any substantial arguments between characters — ideas put into dramatic action. Moments of controversy breeze by, such as a misogynistic comment for which he’s chastised. His first marriage to singer Miriam Makeba, whose career suffered severely after she married Carmichael, feels checked off rather than portrayed.
The problem may simply be the choice of framing device. The mother-son conflict becomes, structurally, the primary component of the play. He has abandonment issues; she fears he will depict her as a bad parent. He wants her to carry on for him; she refuses to admit he’s dying. These tensions just don’t carry sufficient weight. They feel generic, when Stokely Carmichael was anything but.
The work is expressive, and occasionally moving, but also unvarying in tone. Yeaji Kim’s set is dominated by a pile of items, such as dresser drawers and other pieces. Sepia-toned, it clearly evokes jumbled memories. I think it’s also supposed to suggest a barricade for that revolution that remains unfinished.
“Stokely: the Unfinished Revolution” has some theatrical poetry in it, a lot of sympathy, a sense of loss. But it also feels like it never fully finds its subject.
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