30 Walter Lee Youngers Better Than Diddy

Give credit where credit is due. You gave the exact reason in your opening as to why Diddy was the only choice for the reprisal of his role – the numbers. This is in no way in defense of Diddy’s acting chops. Nor do I believe it should be only about the Nielson viewership numbers. However, you must remember that those Broadway numbers are the reason more and more “Black productions” are being financed on and off Broadway. The industry is taking note of the massive draw of these black “musicians/celebrities” to bring an audience to a play that they would have likely never seen otherwise. Usher in Chicago, Fantasia in the color purple, Mos Def in Top dog/Underdog – the list could go on and on with all those productions whose sales skyrocketed with the addition of a celeb. Do not think the recent influx of black dollars did not have an impact on finally getting “A cat on a hot tin roof” to the stage after 12 years. If this TV adaptation does good numbers, it will lead to more productions (Hopefully) which in turn will allow for better non-celebrity casting because it will have built a core demographic of its own to justify its production cost to the financiers and studios.

In a society where the only “art/culture” our children and adult brothers and sisters are experiencing is the cooning coming from BET, Tyler Lynch (Tyler Perry to his momma), and Zane – it’s good to know that having someone like Diddy involved in such an important work will bring both children and adults to a piece that they would have never seen nor been able to appreciate otherwise. I am not saying this applies to all things. I remember a friend attempting to make a point one day when we were on the train and there were about seven people in our car that were reading those ghetto novels that are all the rage on the corner salesman market as to how just getting them to open a book was the first step to getting them to appreciate quality literature. She was enthused by the fact that people reading and it did not matter what they were reading because at least they were reading. I do not have the same viewpoint as my friend of believing everything called “art” can work as a gateway to better culture and art as she does. I do not believe seeing Tyler Lynch will have you in the theatre the next week watching “A soldier’s Story”. However, I do believe in a case like this where all the other elements of the production are so great it can and will lead to these same people seeing the light and check out other quality productions on the literature, theatre, film, and TVside.

It is also important to take note that this is not a one-man show. Diddy will be surrounded and supported by some of today’s best actors – Phylicia Rashad, Audra McDonald, Sanaa Lathan, and Bill Nunn. They will not allow this piece to fall by the waist side by the hand of one man. I honestly believe with them involved there is no way it could be as horrible as people are expecting it to be. The great thing about it being a movie, unlike theatre, is that there is the ability for multiple takes and edits to bring forth the best production of the work possible. Let us pray that he surprised all of us as TI did in ATL (not to be confused with his work in ATL)

Diddy is going to be the orange juice that gets them to swallow the pill. Give him his credit for being part of the cure.

G.D.

I would have replied sooner but I finally got my hands on Ep 3 of the Wire and that took president to all other matters. Now back to this:

“You don’t find this high class-low class distinction you’re making troubling?”

No. I do not find the distinctions in quality to be troubling. Not all things are created equal, we should not accept for others to define those works as such to then be taken as truth for us. I hate the idea that we as black people are only allowed to be one type of black and anything that steps outside of those set perimeters is seen as anything less black. Is it troubling to not want to be seen on TV, on stage, in movies and books as a shucking and jiving, gun totting, drug using/dealing, chicken and watermelon eating caricatures of what society deems as approval images of black or does it that make me an elitist to hate those images and the blacks that perpetuate it? Look at the election we’re currently in where the wife of an admitted drug users has her staff not so subtly imply that the black candidate must have a history of drug selling because he admitting to drug using and the fact that society believes the connection they are making.

Do you really believe these negative portrayals and the reinforcement of stereotypes like the ones Tyler Lynch and the rest of his ilk don’t serve to push us further back as a people and erode every step we have taken in the past 60 years to be respected as equals (Still fighting that fight) in the world of theatre, literature, and film? I have been trying to get an answer to what the hell African-American literature is at my local library for years and why are authors like James Baldwin, Nikki Giovanni, and Langston Hughes not worthy to be on the same shelves as Hemmingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald in the classic American literature section. I, with the voices of many many others, finally got them to get rid of that god-awful section and place all the books together. They still have that godforsaken African-American literature sticker on them, but it is a step forward that I feel we are losing with the negative works being pushed as our new generation of literature. The same applies to all quality art forms created by people of color that are being ignored for this crap we are being bombarded with.

“who cares if the work is ‘important’ if it’s not good?”

Your sentiment falls short on the fact that the work actually is good. Are you honestly telling me Diddy’s bad can truly outweigh everyone else in that casts good? This is not a matter of the work not being good enough. Those plays are amazing works that we just have to educate and open up our brothers and sisters to just as we were. The first time I heard Monk from my mother as a child it hurt my ears, then my mother played a video of him performing live and put it into the context of what his significance to music was and it clicked to me, from that day on, I was hooked. Just watching Bill Cosby play night in Tunisia by Art Blakey as a child gave me and I am sure many other adolescents, a deeper appreciation and love for Jazz that had me searching out more classic works from Miles, Coltrane, and many others. You are not born with the knowledge of what the best things this society has to offer are, you are introduced to them. In many cases, these kids grow up in a one-parent, low-middle class household where people are working two jobs to support the home. They do not have the expendable income, knowledge, and/or time to take their kids to the Met every weekend, Shakespeare in the park, first Saturdays at the Brooklyn museum, or any of the other amazing cultural activities the city has to offer. There has to be other avenues to give that young soul that enlightenment and access to all the wonders that exist for him/her. Not more reinforcement of images that perpetuate the stereotypes of what the media tells them they are and can only be.

Tyler Lynch plays to the Jim Crow era of entertainment were it was illegal to read and intelligence was a crime punishable by death. He plays to the lowest common denominator with giving reflections of us as a people under the guise of portraying “real life family satire”; a story of that member of “our” family that we all have as he asserts in his interviews. It wouldn’t be so bad if we had anything to counteract those negative images of us, but the Cosby show isn’t on anymore and we’re back to believing that black people cannot be married, loving, lawyers and doctors and HBCU don’t exist and if we do believe they exist, they provide a substandard education to their white academic counterparts. We have to do better and not accept less.

“Give credit where credit is due. You gave the exact reason in your opening as to why Diddy was the only choice for the reprisal of his role – the numbers.”

– Yeah, we did. And that’s all the credit we intend to give him here. That he was responsible for the play putting up those record-breaking numbers isn’t debatable, and kudos to him for the financial successes of a classic black play’s revival.

Of course, we were just playing around with this whole “everybody and their daddy’s better than Diddy” thing.

But in light of the discussion we’re having, I guess a few things come to mind:

a.) How is “at least Diddy got people to come to a black Broadway show” different than the “at least they’re reading?” sentiment?

Leaving aside the other presumably solid performances in this TV film version (because, really, we’re talking about Diddy’s involvement and how much *better* the TV film had the potential to be if he’d stepped aside and let someone with a TV background at least pinch hit for him this time around), Diddy’s not a good actor. That much is clear from the work he’s done to date and from the trailer alone for ‘Raisin.’

So to say that we should laud him b/c he’s popular and lent his popularity to a “good cause” (blacks patronizing black theatre) is on par with saying we should pat people on the back for purchasing the works of Zane or the titles, Shiesty and its sequel, Still Shiesty, for perusal on the subway. Right?

To scoff at the “at least they’re reading” argument and then say that we shouldn’t get to josh around with Diddy for being the really weak link in a classic play–especially since part of the argument is, “at least he’s getting people to watch” seems a bit uneven.

b.) It really is good that more people know this play b/c they saw it on Broadway with Diddy in it. But I have to wonder if that wasn’t just a one-time thing, particularly if they were unimpressed with his performance, despite his star-power. Will they go see another play “just because he’s in it” or will they be like, “Fool me once, shame on you?”

It’d be nice to assess the successes of adding “big names” with little or no acting background to casts of classically trained thespians over a long period of time. Will having Fantasia or Usher or Diddy in plays start to backfire? When the novelty of this tactic wears off and, again, it all comes back to the play itself–the story, the acting, the characters–will the same audiences who just wanted to see/be in the same room with a star for two hours be impressed enough by the story to want to add a spate of other Broadway plays to their to-do list?

GVG:

Are you really saying a made-for-TV movie can be a catalyst for social uplift? Or that any ‘art’ can be? That seems like a huge leap.

You’re also making some pretty problematic class distinctions. Why is jazz fundamentally “better” than, say, hip-hop? Or a Tyler Perry play fundamentally ‘better’ than ‘A Raisin in The Sun’? Perry’s work seems to deal with the same themes and with the same stance on the importance of family, but obviously in a very different tenor. You say that Tyler Perry trafficks in stereotype, but an argument could be made that ‘A Raisin in The Sun’ is chock full of its own stereotypes. We could go around and around on this.

Preferring one to the other is ultimately a matter of personal taste, but it’s telling that your personal taste is influenced by class concerns.

(I think this dovetails nicely with the Bill Cosby conversation, btw.)

G.D.

“Are you really saying a made-for-TV movie can be a catalyst for social uplift? Or that any ‘art’ can be?”

I’m saying as I have in every response I have given that anything that stands as a counterbalance to all the negative images we are being bombarded with on a daily basis, both by us and them, is needed and necessary. Where catering to the lowest common denominator has not just become acceptable, it has become the standard. I believe we ALL need to see these works shown prominently and regularly to change the perception for both ourselves and those looking in and yes I believe it will stand as a catalyst for social upliftment. What is a catalyst if not a series of small actions that lead to a greater change? Look at any major change in our history you can usually pinpoint it to a couple of actions that happen to occur at the right time, in the right place, with the right people paying attention to cause a social shift. Why wouldn’t the same apply to art? It was the same series of events in reverse that got us to the negative state we’re in right now; why not try to force the pendulum to swing back the other way.

As for you trying get from my statements that I believe jazz is any more important than Hip Hop, and yes, I believe in the distinctions between rap and hip-hop, you are very mistaken. I am hip-hop to the core. I live it with each breath and appreciate all that it has brought to my life. I used Monk as an example to illustrate how through education someone brought me from a place of ignorance to a state of understanding who had a better knowledge of the art to impact on me. We can use hip-hop as a perfect example of how a shift has occurred in society reflective or caused by the content of the music, dependent upon whom you ask. Where it was once cool to be smart, lyrical, witty, and somewhat respectful of woman to now “Ay bay bay” and “suparman the hoe” being the standard by which record deals are given. What does that say about the lack of counterbalances?

“You’re also making some pretty problematic class distinctions.”

Fine! Go ahead and paint me with the classist brush because I want us to do better and in turn be seen as better.

“Tyler Perry play fundamentally ‘better’ than ‘A Raisin in The Sun’? Perry’s work seems to deal with the same themes and with the same stance on the importance of family, but obviously in a very different tenor.”

The tenor, which you seem to conveniently leave out of your argument, is the cooning of his characters and in turn of us the American black families people honestly believe he is mirroring in his works. It is a two-hour minstrel show with everyone playing his or her roles, just the way Massa likes to see us. I also realize this argument will just go round and round as you said. I have read your writing and I do not believe you to be the type to blindly co-sign everything black as right. So please take a real look at those images he and his ilk creates of us as a people and pose the question to yourself – Is this who I want to be seen as? And if the answer is no, Then look at the images on TV and film and see how many images that are truly a reflection of the man you’d like to be seen as. The man I already know you to be from the little bit of your writing I have already read.

I do agree with you that this discussion aligns itself perfectly with the Cosby post. As I finished responding yesterday, I clicked onto the post and realized this was exactly where our discussion was leading.

P.S. Both you and slb just made me burn my toast.