A Song Flung Up to Heaven - Maya Angelou [20]
Surely he returned to Paris with some truth and some fiction. Surely he wrote an account of the Watts riot allowing his readers to hold on to the stereotypes that made them comfortable while congratulating themselves on being in possession of some news.
Ten
Frank Silvera was exactly what is meant in South America by the word mestizo. His ancestors were African and Spanish, and he was a light-skinned black man who could play a Mexican father to Marlon Brando’s Zapata. A black man who could play an Italian father to Ben Gazzara in A Hatful of Rain on Broadway. A black man who could play the title role of Shakespeare’s King Lear.
Silvera had a theater company in Los Angeles that he named the Theatre of Being or, as the member actors called it, Tee Oh Bee. Beah Richards, my next-door neighbor, was the star of the company, with Vantile Whitfield and Dick Anthony Jones as resident leading men.
Beah, with her success on and off Broadway and particularly in James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner, was a legend in the African-American community. At the time I met her, she was often called our greatest stage actress, vying only with Ruby Dee for that honor.
Frank decided to stage Medea at his Theatre of Being. Naturally, Beah would take the title role. And just as naturally, she would take it beyond all real or imagined limits. When Frank announced the project, Beah and I and a few friends celebrated. In the middle of that evening’s festivities, problems were mentioned. Beah didn’t drive. I offered to take her to the theater each day, and she said she would pay for the gas.
The role of the nurse had not been filled. I joined the line of actors auditioning, and, using a Langston Hughes poem and a Shakespearean sonnet, I was given the role of the nurse.
I knew I was adequate, but I was never sure if Frank hired me because of my talent or to ensure that Beah had a way to get to the theater.
Frank and Beah shared a profound mutual admiration. She would speak, and he would either laugh uproariously or stroke his chin and pace the floor, lost in a deep brown study.
Rehearsals further increased my insecurity. I would stand backstage as Frank consistently positioned Beah center stage under the bright beams. Of course she was the star, but the role of the nurse was not irrelevant, and he never called on me. I began to smart in the shadows. I went to a bookstore and bought Euripides’ version of Medea, as well as every book I could find about Medea, Jason, the Argo and the Golden Fleece.
There was a neighborhood bar next to the theater. I informed the stage manager that I could be found in the bar whenever I was wanted. Each day I would drop Beah off, greet folks in the theater, then go to sit at a table in the dimly lit bar. I worked out who the nurse was and why she was so loyal to Medea.
In my created version of the play’s history, Nurse had been the midwife at Medea’s birth. Nurse had a baby just after Medea was born, but Nurse’s baby died. Medea’s mother, not wanting the bother, persuaded Nurse to become a nurse cow and give to Medea the dead child’s milk.
In the bar, I built my character, her whims and her whimsy. I decided early on that Nurse thought of Medea as her own daughter and doted on the girl. As Medea grew into womanhood, Nurse cherished her, idolized her and followed her everywhere, walking as precisely as possible in her footsteps. When Medea married Jason, Nurse attended the ceremony. When Medea stole the fleece of pure gold from her father, the king, because Jason asked her to do so, Nurse helped her. Nurse later escaped the king’s rage by joining Medea on the Argonauts’ ship, the Argo. Nurse was crippled by arthritis because she often slept on the ground. She didn’t mind the discomfort as long as she was near Medea. She had grown old and dotty in service to Medea, who took Nurse’s worship as her due. Maddened by rage at Jason’s growing coldness toward her, Medea killed their two sons. Nurse knew of the murders but gave Medea no rebuke, saying, “She did what any woman would have done if provoked.