death at a funeral directed by neil labute
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
But this joke is one of the few times we see Rock thinking about race at all. Of the five movies he has now produced as starring vehicles for himself, three have been remakes of movies that starred white actors—before Death at a Funeral he did Down to Earth (2001), a remake of Warren Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait (1978); and I Think I Love My Wife (2007), a remake of Eric Rohmer’s Chloe in the Afternoon (1972). Interspersed with these have been two sharp and incisive movies about the African-American experience: Head of State (2003), a wacky political satire with Rock as the first black man to win the White House, and Good Hair (2009), a fascinating comic documentary about the black hair care industry. As Rock zigzags from one category to the other, he seems to be reliving in a single career the same conflict that’s animated African-American theater for decades: whether to embrace the white European dramatic tradition or establish a new tradition that speaks to black social concerns.
The “Voodoo Macbeth,” as it came to be called, was a sensation in New York, but the many white critics who focused on the play’s cultural exotica unintentionally exposed the central flaw of such productions: they were conceived for white audiences, who enjoyed them mostly for their novelty. (The same phenomenon would rear its head 20 years later when Oscar Hammerstein II turned Verdi’sBizet’s opera Carmen into the southern-fried Carmen Jones.) The Negro Theatre Unit had produced numerous works by aspiring black playwrights, but a truly great African-American theater wouldn’t emerge until the civil rights era, when writers like Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, Ossie Davis, Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, and Charles Gordone addressed the African-American experience in all its contradictions and complexity.
