INEXPLICABLE
Sex, drugs, profanity, but no laughs in Richard Pryor fantasia ‘Unspeakable’
Here is the crucial problem with “Unspeakable,” the fantasia inspired by the life of Richard Pryor that began at a New York Fringe Festival and is now onstage at the Broadway Playhouse: While the show revels in all the pathology (and then some) of the man who catapulted black comedy and social commentary to a whole new level in the late 1960s and ’70s, it fails to suggest his comic genius.
So what we end up with in this play, which has been co-written by actor James Murray Jackson Jr. and his director, Rod Gailes OBC, is more than two hours of profanity, depravity and rampant misogyny— not all of it coherent, and much of it repetitive— without any suggestion of how Pryor was able to make his audiences, both black and white, complicit in his uncensored assessment of race in this country. Nor do we get any convincing sense of how hewas able tomake his audiences laugh at the very brazen nature of his truthtelling.
Without question, Jackson— whose lithe physique, carefully cropped Afro, and mustache render him a perfect double for Pryor— is a gifted actor who can shift swiftly and convincingly from abused child, to angry radio disc jockey, to uneasy celebrity, to resentful, sexu- ally driven partner of several women, to detached father, to ever more pernicious cocaine abuser, to would-be suicide by self-immolation, to crippled old man.
But sorely missing is the only reason we should care about the man who died in 2005 at the age of 65 (an age far older than he ever expected to reach). Pryor was immensely talented. And after an initial period of suppressing his instincts and operating in the shadow of the then widely admired Bill Cosby (Pryor is continually introduced by talk show hosts here as “Richard Cosby”), he broke free and became not just fearless but often reckless. And despite continual efforts at self-destruction, he earned acclaim and a great deal ofmoney, even if most of it went straight up his nose. (A party scene involving Cosby seems like a recent entry and graphically captures his “other side.”)
Clearly Jackson and his co-writer are hobbled by the fact they were unable to use Pryor’s actual comic material, including such memorable characters as Mudbone, the wino philosopher from Mississippi. So they fall back on his obsessive use of the n-word in all its many gradations of pain, rage and self-proclamation, and this can only work for so long. In addition, they give Pryor a ghostly female alter ego, Rat (Taryn Reneau), who is more distracting than illuminating.
Much time is spent describing Pryor’s deeply scarring childhood as the son of Bucky (Ronald L. Conner), a pimp, and a mother, Gertrude (the excellent Kierra Bunch), who worked as a prostitute and who, in one of the play’s most powerfully rendered scenes, refuses to have yet another abortion. It was Pryor’s paternal grandmother (played with chilling authority by E. Faye Butler) who ran the family brothel and raised the child. But none of his caretakers protected him when, as a child, he was sexually abused by a white man (Chris Amos), who threatened him with death should he ever tell anyone about it. And all this conspired to leave Pryor with a hunger for love and approval that could never be fully satisfied.
If Pryor’s resentment of “the white man” was everpresent, so was his dual need, mistrust and need to humiliate women. One of his wives, Jessica (Reneau is excellent here), a white woman, is so desperate to convince him of her devotion that she even tries to seal their bond by sharing a crack pipe.
Along the way it is often difficult to follow Pryor’s leap to fame, the impetus for his eye-opening visit to Africa, or the fact that he ever made movies. To be sure, the psychopathology is always at work, but lost in the fog of “Unspeakable” is the giddy attraction of his comic rebellion.