The Theater: Black People's Time

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THE GREAT MacDADDY

by PAUL CARTER HARRISON

There is a moment in The Great MacDaddy when a group is seated around the table at Mother Faith's St. Louis boardinghouse playing cards.

An old man, gesturing with his half-pint of Imperial, harangues the assemblage in a woozily dis gusted lecture on black pride, or the lack of it. Infected by his rhythms, the card players and their women begin, raggedly at first, then with a soulful swell, to sing Amazing Grace, coloring the hymn with a chaotic ardor and subtlety that would surely alarm any white missionary. It is not conventional hallelujah; like much of this odd, ritualistic musical, the moment has a certain magnificent energy that leaves one feeling lonely when it is over.

MacDaddy, which is the season's first production by Manhattan's Negro Ensemble Company, is a free-form, episodic jour ney through black people's time. It ranges across 20th century America, criss crossing decades. MacDaddy (David Downing) begins as a sort of hustler-prince, a Prohibition vintner on the trail of his vanished friend Wine, who represents a lost magic, the secret of the race. A funky and inventive Candide, MacDaddy travels through peckerwood racism, black venality, Tomism and the death's-head enemy, heroin.

His adventures are organized as a sequence of sketches, or "beats," as Play wright Harrison calls them, with many of the 17 cast members playing a variety of roles — a deacon, a shuffling Stepin Fetchit, crapshooters, addicts.

They speak dialects that fall into scatty rhyme, slick and ingenious, while Cole ridge-Taylor Perkinson's music runs from gospel to voodoo to jazz. The evening is a fairly dense and ambitious odyssey that flirts with incoherence and goes on a bit too long. But the trip is worth it. In a season of obsessive nostalgia, MacDaddy at least has blood in it, and not embalming fluid.