Becoming Something: Canada Lee

Based on actual events, this new play by award-winning playwright Mona Z. Smith, depicts the abbreviated life of the brilliant actor and dedicated black activist, Canada Lee. Once a household name — he started out in Orson Welles’s famed “voodoo” Macbeth and went on to star in such films as Lifeboat, Body and Soul and Cry, the Beloved Country with a young Sidney Poitier — Lee is now a forgotten footnote in the history of the McCarthy era. Betrayed by his country and his friend, Ed Sullivan, who refused to retract naming him a Communist in his nationwide entertainment column, Lee died at the age of 45 in 1952 of a stress-related heart attack. His is one of the few deaths directly attributed to the McCarthy era. Becoming Something: Canada Lee is directed by Traci Burwitz Mariano.