Channeling Hattie McDaniel
Solo show pays tribute to the first African-American to win an Oscar
Vickilyn Reynolds needs you to know some things about Hattie McDaniel. The first African-American actor to win an Academy Award, as “Mammy” in 1939’s “Gone with the Wind,” McDaniel is often dismissed and conflated with the stereotypical maid roles available to her in Hollywood at the time. Now Reynolds wants to set the record straight and give McDaniel her due in her aptly named one-woman show “Hattie McDaniel ... What I Need You to Know!” playing today through Sunday at San Francisco’s Cowell Theatre at Fort Mason Center.
An actor and singer from Philadelphia, Reynolds performed off-Broadway in “The Colored Museum” and played “‘da Singer” in the national tour of “Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk.” She’s appeared in movies such as “Friday” and “Vampire in Brooklyn” and costarred in the short-lived 1990 sitcom “Sugar and Spice.”
Reynolds not only stars as McDaniel but wrote the play and all its songs as well. Still, it initially took a lot to convince her that she had to take this project on, because of her physical resemblance to McDaniel.
“My brother was Ron Richardson,” Reynolds explains. “He won the Tony Award for his role as Jim in ‘Big River.’ Unfortunately, he passed away in 1995, but before he passed away, he said to me, ‘Vickilyn, you do the story of Hattie McDaniel.’ And I was upset, because I
had the wrong information about Hattie McDaniel. And I was on the set of ‘Polly’ (a 1990 TV movie), and a friend of mine, Larry Riley, who was in ‘A Soldier’s Story,’ he said to me, ‘Vickilyn, if nobody approaches you with the idea, if nobody writes it for you, you write it yourself, but you do the life story of Hattie McDaniel.’ And then he passed away. So I started to research Hattie McDaniel, and I found out she was a trailblazer and just an awesome person loved by everybody in Hollywood, both black and white.”
McDaniel was also a singer and songwriter who recorded many of her own
songs in the 1920s before breaking into film in the ’30s. Although some of the songs in this solo show are homages to that era, they’re not McDaniel’s songs but Reynolds’ originals. “One of them is from the title of a song that she had written, ‘Any Kind of Man Would Be Better Than You,’ ” Reynolds adds.
The show has changed a lot since Reynolds started performing it. “When I first started, I had seven cast members,” she says. “Southwest College in Los Angeles was my first performance — I think it was 2006.” She kept the cast of seven in subsequent runs in Denver and New York. “And the reviewers said, is this a one-person show or a fullfledged musical? So I took that into account, because I started writing it as a oneperson play, and then I got scared of myself. I didn’t feel like I could do all these characters. So I rewrote it. When I got to Los Angeles, I started doing it as a one-person show, and the response I received told me it was the right thing to do.”
So what had her impression of McDaniel been at the beginning that made her so resistant to the idea?
“Well, I thought she was a sellout to the race and that she only did mammy and maid roles,” Reynolds recalled. “What I didn’t realize was, what else could she do in 1939? She fought to get the (N word) out of a lot of scripts. She was civil rights before civil rights. She was gung ho about different things that she would and would not do. Just a very feisty, positive person. If it weren’t for her, there wouldn’t be Denzel Washington or Sidney Poitier.”