Review: MALCOLM X AND REDD FOXX WASHING DISHES... Cooks Up Chemistry at City Theatre

As a middle millennial born in 1989, I was a tween and young teen during the twilight years of basic cable, and as a weird little nerd with a handheld rabbit-ears TV, I became a connoisseur of the WB and UPN "feature presentation." If you never got to see these, they were Hollywood movies, typically not super new, put on to fill an evening or Saturday afternoon time slot that would otherwise be filled by a football game. (Usually these were edited for content, but once in a while they'd miss something and you'd see a nipple or hear a swear word, and have to insist to your friends the next day that you didn't imagine it.) One of the films that popped up fairly often was the Eddie Murphy/Martin Lawrence dramedy Life, about two lifers in prison who develop a friendship over multiple decades. Was it heavy material? No, though it sometimes went to darker, more culturally and historically relevant places. I thought about Life quite a bit watching the co-world premiere of Jonathan Norton's Malcolm X and Redd Foxx Washing Dishes at Jimmy's Chicken Shack in Harlem, not because the material is that similiar, but because this new play is that rarest of things: a historical fiction drama that would be just as good, just as relevant, and just as entertaining if it weren't "historical" at all.

Directed by Dexter J. Singleton, the dramedy depicts the kitchen at the Harlem nightspot famous for the birth of the bebop scene, circa 1943. While a mostly-white clientele would eat fried chicken and listen to up-and-coming jazz stars, the mostly-black waitstaff and kitchen crew keep the food coming and the dishes clean, while trying to pop the door open to listen to the music. Enter our two future luminaries, Malcolm X, aka Little (Edwin Green), and Red Foxx, aka Foxy (Trey Smith-Mills), then twenty-year-old dishwashers. Little is a serious, studious type, desperate to escape his past as a small-time gangster, while Foxy is a fun-loving, flashy-dressing hustler who can't seem to keep from getting involved in one scheme after another. As Little attempts to embrace religion to escape the draft, the two young men begin to rub off on each other in unexpected ways, forming a friendship and a brief brotherhood that will change them both forever.

Despite the heaviness of World War 2, the Harlem riots, and the nascent civil rights movement, Norton's play is a good-old-fashioned buddy comedy for the bulk of the evening. Buddy comedy is a harder genre than it appears from the outside, since you need two people who are both very funny, and then funnier together than apart. It also doesn't hurt to have a visual aspect: the "one taller and thin, one shorter and squared off" model is a standard for a reason. With this in mind, you couldn't possibly have a better cast for a show like this than Green and Smith-Mills. Netflix, are you listening? Make this play a movie, and take this cast with you!

Edwin Green, as Little, plays the straight man for most of the play, but in sketch comedy terms, he's more the Glue than the Square: as he reacts to the Clown, he gets funnier and funnier himself, escalating the situation. There's a well of deep feeling in the typically-reserved Little, and Green manages to harmonize both the spiritual searcher and the semi-sublimated thug that Little no longer wishes to be. But though his sense of humor tends to be dry, Green is very funny in the role when it's called for, especially when he tries to teach the uninspired comedian Foxy a joke or a pratfall or two. (The payoff for this is pretty easy to see coming, but I won't spoil it here.)

In the flashier role of Foxy, Trey Smith-Mills has found the part of a lifetime. It takes a great actor to play the role of a genuinely untalented person, and Smith-Mills makes an absolute meal of the hackier side of Foxy's early act. Smith-Mills is an absolute master of reactions and physical comedy, especially when playing Clown off an ampiflying Glue comic like Edwin Green. Their escalating tension and hysteria, mixed with some deft physical comedy, during a sequence involving hair-straightening, has the timing of I Love Lucy mixed with the ramping-up absurdity of Key and Peele... and then, the show's great reversal hits. Suddenly, Foxy is the serious character instead of the joker. Ever seen a funny man make an audience cry? You will.

Kimberly Powers's kitchen set is wonderfully intricate and full of little nooks and crannies; it's not just realistic, it's lived-in. If Green and Smith-Mills had fried up some actual fried chicken live on stage, I wouldn't have been one bit surprised. It's an actor's playground, as its endless props, functions and all-too-convincing sewage drain give the actors a world that feels like the third character in this story. The naturalism of the set and the endless dishwashing "business" gives an element of dramatic realism to balance the sitcom vibe of the more comedic scenes. 

As I alluded to at the top, one of the most interesting things about this show is the way it works both as a piece of historical fiction, and as a totally detached work. There are moments, both cheeky and sincere, where we get brief glimpses of the origins of Malcolm X and Redd Foxx's later personas: Little drops the phrase "by any means necessary" in a different context, and Foxy grimaces when he can't land a joke, landing on the classic Sanford grimace. But even if you were totally unaware of these two figures (or more realistically, if you knew Malcolm X but didn't really know Redd Foxx/Sanford and Son), the play would still "play" just as well. It's a powerful moment in history, and the chemistry and cameraderie between the actors and their characters says as much as any documentary or history book could. This may be the co-world premiere, but I can almost guarantee the show's story doesn't end here.