ARTS REVIEW: 'THURGOOD'

Starring Laurence Fishburne at The Geffen in Westwood, California

By: Clare Elfman

July 11, 2010

Los Angeles.  Laurence Fishburne walks onto a simple stage: table, a few chairs. He sets down his briefcase and casually begins to tell you his story…not to the audience but to you. He is Thurgood Marshall, first black Justice of the Supreme Court, and for the next hour and a half, you are so much a part of this intimate…I would call it a conversation, not a simple monologue, because when he asks a rhetorical question…for instance, he asks if you ever heard of such and such, people in the audience simply called out the answer.

He is so much Marshall talking to you in his office or living room, friend to friend, that you come to know him as a kid from Baltimore, supported toward excellence by a schoolteacher mother who sold her wedding rings to pay his law school tuition; as a waiter (with his father) in an all-white men’s club serving one patron who screamed “nigger” when he wanted service; a guy who also left $20 tips for a kid needing tuition, and when his father, a waiter in that club, furious, asked his son why he tolerated that insult, he said as long as the tips came, he’d tolerate. When they did not, watch out. The family was proud and pugnacious, citing an ancestor in slavery who was so difficult and argumentative that his owner couldn’t tolerate him, nor did anyone want to buy him, so they set him free. But he didn’t believe in fighting violence and injustice with force. He believed in fighting with the law.  He was committed heart and soul to the cause of Civil Rights. Equal justice for all.  And as a lawyer with the NAACP, he argued and won the case of Brown vs. The Board of Education and desegregated schools in this country.

Listening to his casual retelling of his life, you got not only a history lesson of a country that tolerated the concept of “separate but equal,” meaning separate restaurants, restrooms and schools, but a personal story of a black kid who got into so much trouble in school that the principal used to send him down to the basement to cool off with nothing to read but the US Constitution…and the irony of that punishment which fed his dreams of becoming a lawyer. You met a kid who explained that he was named after Thoroughlygood Marshall, and it was too much spelling for a kid with assignments so he shortened it to Thurgood. You heard stories of a young lawyer going south to plead a case and barely escaping a lynching of “…that black upstart lawyer.”

What’s shocking is how recent were these events. He gives you dates and you sit there in the darkened theater counting back on your fingers and realizing it was yesterday. Humiliation. Deprivation. Cruelty. And yet Fishburne as Marshall speaks of all the injustices he had to suffer without animus. You fought using the law.  And he fervently believed that one man could make a difference. He relates his experience with General McArthur’s tolerance of segregation in the armed forces, and of Lyndon Johnson’s determination to get him seated in the Supreme Court…shades of Kagan’s current questioning since she worked for Marshall.

Fishburne as Thurgood begins his conversation with a reference to his good college friend, the poet Langston Hughes, and quotes a wonderful line: Oh let America be America again. Thurgood Marshall was an honorable man. These are hard times for finding a truly honorable man among our leaders.  We wade though dust from so many “feet of clay,” we find ourselves longing for good old Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. And Fishburne portrays a truly honorable man…a couple of drinks maybe… admirer of women maybe, but husband and father totally and absolutely committed to justice and the word of the law.

In his role in the Matrix films, Fishburne played a man with superhuman skills and courage. Now onstage, in real time, he becomes the man who showed this country how one man, in reality, against odds, with great courage, could help to shape a nation to its higher potential.

Masterful performance of George Stevens, Jr.’s much awarded play. In the background, shifting photos of the times of Marshall’s struggle give depth to the story.

Sidebar: Just recently, BBC’s Masterpiece Theater did the mystery Foyle’s War. One episode involved the violence against black soldiers who had fought side by side with southern whites on the beaches of Normandy and were now being threatened with mayhem back home if they didn’t “know their place.”

In Thurgood, you get an excellent performance, the portrait of an honorable and committed man, and a history lesson.

At the Geffen in Westwood until August 8, 2010.