Fetch Clay, Make Man
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SHOW INFORMATION
CURRENTLY CLOSED
Opened Jan 15, 2010
Closed Feb 14, 2010
Opened Jan 15, 2010
Closed Feb 14, 2010
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Visit the Fetch Clay, Make Man website:
http://www.mccarter.org
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WHAT IS IT ABOUT?
In the days before one of the most controversial fights in boxing history, 23-year-old heavyweight champ Muhammad Ali formed an improbable bond with former Hollywood star Stepin Fetchit. Set in the heady times of the mid-1960s, after years of struggle and a series of Civil Rights victories, Will Power's Fetch Clay, Make Man explores the story of two wildly different men, each struggling to create and shape his image and legacy.
WHAT ARE CRITICS SAYING?
What are other members saying?
RE:Stephin Fetchit Meets Muhammad Ali!
Critic David Finkle writes: "While the point Power is ultimately making in this work involves the conflicted elements hampering the progress African-Americans want to make in a white-dominated society, it might help if he could find a faster way to indicate where hes headed. One helpful move might be to eliminate the couple of digressive flashbacks to the early 1930s studio office where mogul William Fox the always reliable Richard Masur is signing Fetchit then Lincoln Perry to a lucrative contract -- sequences intended to demonstrate yet another manner in which blacks accommodated to whites," -- I cant help but to disagree. Change does not come easy, especially in the dominant white culture that Mr. Finkle references. To suggest that the elimination of scenes depicting the wit and intellectual play used by Lincoln Perry aka Stephin Fetchit to advance his career and outsmart his adversary is destructive to Perrys image and plays directly into the historical depiction of blacks as inferior intellectual beings. Those scenes show otherwise and Im immensely glad that they are included in this dynamic production by Will Power. My theater group braved the snow storm on 2/6/10 to journey to Princeton for this production and we all agreed that Fetch Clay, Make Man was marvelous. Ben Vereen played a dynamic Stephin Fetchit, especially in the flashbacks. Id highly recommend this production.
Reviewed by pathouser
on Monday, Feb 8th, 2010
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For his 1965 Lewiston, Maine rematch against Sonny Liston, Muhammad Ali invited faded movie character actor Stepin Fetchit to act as a
"secret strategist." This astounding turn of events -- in which a recent convert
to the Nation of Islam chose to depend on a man whose image as an on-screen
shuffler conjures deplored Uncle Tomism -- is the subject of Will Power's new play Fetch Clay, Make Man at Princeton's McCarter Theatre, an impressive elaboration-on-the-facts exercise that could still do with some careful dramaturgical refinement.
As Power reflects it, Ali (lookalike Evan Parke) -- no longer Cassius Clay to himself, to wife Sonji (Sonequa Martin), and to the world -- has a specific ex[...]