Miles Marshall Lewis

Best experienced live, Fishburne’s detailing of his private family history takes turns eliciting humor and generating sympathy for both the actor and his octogenarian mother. During his childhood, Hattie Crawford ran a charm school — his Brooklyn home decorated with several full-length wall mirrors as women took turns striking poses and strutting the catwalk of his living room. In the play, Fishburne depicts the character playing his mother as one who plies her child with “nasty pills” on occasion, and takes sexual advantage of him during the same years she pushed him toward early film roles like “Mr. Clean” in the Vietnam War epic, “Apocalypse Now.”