In this video, from McCarter’s “Live at the Library” series, features playwright Will Power talking about the plot of Fetch Clay, Make Man.

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

Ben Vereen and Evan Parke in Fetch Clay, Make Man. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

Have you seen Fetch Clay, Make Man?

What did you think? Did you think it was the bee’s knees? Do you agree with the newspaper reviews, or disagree? Favorite parts of the show? Things that weren’t to your taste?

Post an “audience response” or read what other people are saying by clicking on the “comments” link below.

We can’t wait to hear what you think!

Fetch Clay, Make Man playwright Will Power is also a genius performer—see these videos to get just a small taste of what he’s like in performance—as “Old School Rapper”!

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre

OMG.

Can I say it again?  OMG.

Fetch Clay, Make Man playwright Will Power—on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report.  And he totally holds his own.  You must see it.

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

Okay, I’m a member of Generation Y.  While it has its benefits (Oregon Trail, Where’s Waldo, and the fact that I have a computer in my kitchen), it also means that I lack a certain cultural knowledge about, well, anything that happened before the 1990’s.

So working on Fetch Clay, Make Man—a play about the unlikely friendship between controversial former Hollywood actor Stepin Fetchit and heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali—has been quite an experience.  So much for me to learn!  Fortunately, as a child of the 1980’s, I immediately thought of digital media and social networking as a way to fill in my knowledge gap.  And of course, both Ali and Fetchit are represented on Youtube.

So here’s the first part of our Generation Y video roundup—some excerpts of Stepin Fetchit in performance.  If you’ve never seen it—it’s quite something!  The first is from Judge Priest, the second is him performing the song “Lazy Richard.”

What do you think?  Is he cleverly subverting the social order of his time, or is he perpetuating a stereotype?  Share your comments below by clicking on the “comments” link, then come and see Fetch Clay, Make Man and see playwright Will Power brilliantly engage the question.

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

I had the great good fortune last week of listening to two of this season’s plays being read aloud.  First, I heard a reading of Fetch Clay, Make Man that we produced in NYC.  This was the third or fourth reading of the play that I have heard, and it’s a revelation every time.  And then on Friday, I was able to stay for the first read-through of Having Our Say.  A few months ago I saw an archival video of McCarter’s 1995 production of Having Our Say, but this was the first time I’ve been able to hear that play read live.

Hearing these two plays in dialogue with each other made me think about some of the themes that run through all of the plays in our season.  For me, one of the most powerful and resonant themes is of how we shape (or try to shape) our own self-images.  The characters in this season’s plays are interested in creating a version of themselves for others to see, and a great deal of the dramatic tension in this year’s plays comes out of the distance and dissonance between the characters themselves and the image they are trying to create.  In Having Our Say, as Bessie and Sadie Delany reflect on their lives one hears a difference in how they speak about each other and how they speak about themselves.  As African-American women living through 100 years of American history, their lives were filled with situations in which they had to forge a public identity of themselves that doesn’t always match the inner woman.   In She Stoops to Conquer, characters disguise themselves, pretending to be lower class in order to, well, conquer.  Fetch Clay, Make Man examines very literally what happens to people as they shape their public images—Cassius Clay becomes Muhammad Ali, Lincoln Perry becomes Stepin Fetchit, and even the supporting characters (Sonji Clay, William Fox and Brother Rashid) are in the process of re-shaping their images.  They are changing their names and putting on metaphorical masks as they make the man (or woman!) that they will become.  American Buffalo concerns three small-time crooks as they posture for each other and negotiate their relationships, and Take Flight tells the story of four pioneers of aviation, trying to shape their legacies.

So I started to wonder why this theme felt so present this season (in a way that it didn’t, for example, last season).  Of course, part of it is that three of this season’s plays are about historical characters (the Delany Sisters, Fetchit, Ali, Fox and Clay, and of course the Wright Brothers, Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh).  In writing these characters drawn from America’s history book, the playwrights are naturally intrigued by the questions of identity and legacy–who was the private person underneath the public, etc.  But perhaps also maybe there’s something about this moment, at least for us here at McCarter, that drew us (unconsiously, I’m sure) to stories that share in an exploration of shaping self-image.  As we enter our artistic director’s 20th season and start our first full season with a new managing director, we’ve all spent a lot of time thinking about who we are as a theater right now, and what our identity is in the world and our own community.  And as our nation has undergone a massive shift, with democrats winning two of the three branches of our government, and with a president who represents, for many, a very new (and welcome) idea of the image of American leadership, it seems natural that we would be thinking about these questions.  Frankly, as America starts to look toward our sister nations and say: “we are a different country  now than we were a year ago,” perhaps we are all thinking about identity differently.

What do you think?  Coincidence, or is there an underlying trend here?

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre