Assumptions about race examined in 'Between Men and Cattle'
Source:  Main Line Life Online, March 27, 2000

By By Sally Friedman, Main Line Life Correspondent

Sometimes when theater is at its shining best, you get what might be called the “Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address Syndrome” – a reaction of stunned silence. It’s surely not the silence of indifference – legend has it that in the case of Lincoln’s memorable address, people were simply too overwhelmed to react.

In a darkened theater space, it’s the same phenomenon, seen rarely.

But there it was at the conclusion of the first act of "Between Men and Cattle", InterAct Theatre Co.’s magnificent world premiere offering of Richard Kalinowski’s piercing look at race in all its ramifications.

It took five years to get this play from conception to page to stage, and the wait was worth it. Kalinowski was deeply struck, some years ago, by a televised interview of a precocious black child and set about to develop that single memory into a full-blown examination of what it means to be black, and, ultimately, whether nonblacks can ever fully understand that immutable fact of birth and, presumably, destiny.

In a powerful first act, we meet Ernest Freeman Jr. (Bruce Burton Robinson), who has just placed second in a Martin Luther King memorial oratorical contest, and whose oratorial brilliance has piqued the curiosity of Jerry Rudman (Anthony Lawton), a white, newly minted reporter.

As the youngster faces his first interview in a diner where he can eat anything he chooses at the expense of the Rudman’s newspaper, he also begins to reveal his enormous gift and reverence for language, which the reporter finds all the more fascinating because of the boy’s race and background.

Ernest’s stories spill out over pancakes and the eggs his late mother, and most passionate teacher, has mandated he eat, as his father (Vincent Yates) sits nearby as proud protector/adviser of the son he knows is “rare.”

And father knows best: Ernest is no ordinary 11-year-old.

The youngster, who touchingly totes a lunch box that contains his treasures, even spots the inequity in the interview format where he is doing all the giving and the reporter is greedily taking. He is both wary – and touchingly vulnerable – all the more so because Ernest, at 11, is being played by the enormously gifted, middle-aged Robinson.

Ernest may be a lot of things, but he is surely not ready to be the subject of a career-establishing profile by Rudman that features the boy as a “Jewel of the Ghetto,” a headline that is flashed on a screen behind the set that projects various relevant images throughout the play.

Acting as our narrators/guides through this engaging terrain are Vincent Yates and Cathy Simpson, both of whom ably take on other roles as we encounter the reporter and his subject again, decades later. Now, Dr. Ernest Freeman is about to be sworn in as the president of a prestigious private – and lily-white – college.

The fireworks come quickly in Act II and concern the core issues of the play, whose title stems from "The Souls of Black Folks" by W.E.B. DuBois. “The sincere and passionate belief of the older South,” wrote DuBois, “is that somewhere between men and cattle, God created a tertium quid and called it a Negro.”

When all is said and done, the new college president faces the ultimate moral/ethical challenge of his personal and professional life, and the reporter is privy to it. To say more might be to spoil some of the play’s impact.

How Freeman, who believes that “… the privacy of my soul comes before the color of my skin,” decides what to do, with the college’s provost and cook as his conscience, frames some of the most compelling drama this reviewer has seen on any stage.

And that the college president and the journalist seem destined to remain strangers, or as the script suggests, “… two men trying to jump over history,” gives the work its ultimate power.

Four stellar performances – the dazzling direction of Mark Hallen – and a script that positively crackles – all yield a marvelous evening of powerful theater.

InterAct Theatre Co.’s Between Men and Cattle runs at The Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., Philadelphia through April 9. Tickets: $20 ($16 for seniors, $12 for seniors).

For information, call 215-569-9700